Six US oil executives that were jailed in Venezuela on corruption charges have been partly released; they were permitted to switch to house arrest on Friday.
The partial release of Tomeu Vadell, Jose Luis Zambrano, Alirio Zambrano, Jorge Toledo, Gustavo Cardenas and Jose Pereira was confirmed to The Associated Press by their family members.
In November 2020, Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal sentenced six former executives of Houston-based CITGO, a subsidiary of PDVSA, on corruption charges.
The sentences included a 13-year prison term for Jose Pereira, CITGO’s former president, on charges of embezzlement, criminal association, and money laundering. Other officials were sentenced to terms ranging from eight to ten years.
The executives, some of whom have dual US-Venezuelan citizenship, were arrested in late 2017 after attending a meeting at the Caracas office of Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA. They were detained in Caracas and transferred to the General Directorate of Military Counterintelligence.
The six were granted house arrest in December 2019, but it did not last long, as they were put back in jail two months later.