Eduardo Travieso: The Derwick Associates – JP Morgan Connection

Been trying to get a clearer picture of the involvement of JP Morgan in laundering millions of dollars siphoned out of Venezuela by Derwick Associates. A source recently pointed me in the right direction, and so I found in New York property records’ database documents that demonstrate, beyond reasonable doubt, that JP Morgan bankers purchased property -as proxies- on behalf of Derwick Associates, while it also granted a $5.8 million mortgage on said property. It’s all there in the documents, which can be seen by visiting this site, selecting business name from the options, and inputting BL 641 Fifth LLC. BL stands, of course, for Betancourt Lopez, the last names of Alejandro, Derwick Associates point man. BL 641 Fifth LLC is a company incorporated in New York.

Readers may remember that I called JP Morgan’s PR man, Doug Morris, to ask what was going on between Eduardo Travieso and the Derwick bolichicos. He didn’t reply, of course, probably in the hope that information about the evident collusion between his employee and a company believed to have stolen billions from Venezuela wouldn’t surface. But surface it did, and now not only do we have the signature of Eduardo Travieso as buyer representing BL 641 Fifth LLC in the documents, we also have evidence of a JP Morgan mortgage on Betancourt Lopez’s Olympic Tower PH6. So basically JP Morgan failed to do any KYC and due diligence on Betancourt Lopez et al, never got to check whether the millions from Betancourt Lopez brought in by Travieso were legitimate, allowed Travieso to act as Betancourt Lopez proxy in a $11.75 million property purchase, and granted a $5.8 million mortgage on the property.

It is likely that Betancourt Lopez used JP Morgan’s bank account to pay ProEnergy Services, Energy Parts Solutions, Al Cardenas, FTI Consulting (which we now have determined was retained by Al Cardenas to clean the reputation on another utterly corrupt Boligarch), and other American providers and subcontractors. So the trail is there, it remains to be seen whether American authorities and regulators will look into it.

How will JP Morgan spin this, if at all, is anyone’s guess. Despite ridiculous arguments in its defence put forth by people who should know better, it remains a fact that JP Morgan is involved in far too many scandals to expect to be taken seriously when claiming innocence. The Venezuela side of things is just a tiny example of what goes on in other parts. Compliance is simply non existent, and the best evidence is that a bunch of kids without a track record -anywhere- used the bank to not only launder proceeds, but to get mortgages and even purchase property on their behalf.

Would this be an isolated event, the benefit of the doubt could still be given to JP Morgan. Trouble is, it isn’t, its systematic. The bank’s wrongdoing is all over the place, actually it looks more and more like a gang of cowboys doing all sorts of dodgy deals, anywhere they can. While the London face of such irresponsable behaviour is Bruno Iksil, his Venezuelan counterpart is Eduardo Travieso, and Travieso is not the only Venezuelan working at JP Morgan…