Gold CEO captured on bus in $970m laundering case

A manhunt for the chief executive officer of CI Goldex SA has ended after police captured John Hernandez on a public bus last night, according to Colombia’s Attorney General’s office.
“He was captured while traveling with his wife in the province of Quindio,” Luz Angela Bahamon, a public prosecutor who headed the investigation, said in a telephone interview last night.
The AG’s office alleges that Goldex is at the center of a $970 million money-laundering scheme, the biggest in the country’s history. Colombia’s cocaine traffickers, Marxist guerrillas and others launder about $10 billion a year, equivalent to about 3 percent of gross domestic product, according to the government’s financial intelligence unit.
Colombian authorities spent three years investigating Goldex, once the nation’s second-biggest gold exporter. In a September interview from his fortified gold foundry in Medellin, Hernandez said he had done nothing wrong.

This post was published at Mineweb