On May 8, 2013, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the unsealing of a multi-count criminal complaint against members of Direct Access Partners’ (DAP) Miami based Global Markets trading group and the Senior Vice President (SVP) of Banco de Desarollo Economico y Social De Venezuela (BANDES), a state owned and state controlled economic development of Venezuela. The criminal complaint alleges that members of DAP and the SVP of BANDES conspired to violate the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act’s (FCPA) anti-bribery provisions when members of BANDES paid kickbacks in the form of wire transfers from Swiss bank accounts to the SVP in exchange for maintaining BANDES’ lucrative trading business. The criminal complaint further alleges that SVP took advantage of her senior role at BANDES to ensure that BANDES’ bonds trades were steered to DAP. According to the criminal complaint, most of the trades executed by the DAP on behalf of BANDES involved fixed income investments for which the DAP charged BANDES a mark-up on purchases and a mark-down on sales causing DAP to generate millions of dollars....
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