Ex-CEO of Nodus Bank gets 9 years after millions moved through Miami companies

A former chief executive of a Puerto Rico bank popular with Venezuelans — including many in South Florida — has been sentenced to more than nine years in federal prison for siphoning millions of dollars from the institution through transactions involving Miami companies and conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions on Venezuela.

Tomás Niembro Concha, 64, a Spanish and Venezuelan national who headed Nodus International Bank, was sentenced to 112 months in prison and three years of supervised release. He was also ordered to forfeit more than $16.9 million, representing proceeds he obtained from the fraud conspiracy. Niembro was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida’s Miami Division by U.S. District Judge Kathleen M. Williams.

The sentence is the latest development in the collapse of Nodus, a San Juan-based international bank founded in 2009 and largely run by Venezuelans. Its failure in 2023 left an estimated $80 million in deposits frozen and hundreds of customers trying to recover their money, including Venezuelans living in South Florida.

The criminal case has significant Miami ties. Prosecutors say Niembro, former Nodus Chairman Juan Francisco Ramirez, of Miami, and others caused the bank to invest $11 million in a Miami-based lender so the money could ultimately be loaned to Niembro and Ramirez for their own benefit. The two men also jointly owned Nodus Finance, a Miami company involved in another series of transactions that prosecutors say allowed them to extract millions from the bank.

Niembro pleaded guilty on March 19 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the federal law underlying many U.S. sanctions programs.

“The defendant abused his position with Nodus Bank to commit fraud for his own enrichment and to willfully evade sanctions on a designated individual,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva, of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, said in announcing the sentence.

Millions moved through Miami

According to court filings cited by the Justice Department, Niembro and his associates concealed from other Nodus board members, bank executives and Puerto Rico regulators that certain investments and loans were benefiting Niembro and Ramirez, in violation of Puerto Rican law.

From 2017 through 2023, Niembro, Ramirez and others caused Nodus to invest $11 million in a Miami-based lender so the funds could then be loaned to the two bank executives for their personal benefit, prosecutors said. They concealed what they were doing by disguising the transactions as investments by Nodus.

Prosecutors said the two men extracted millions more through Nodus Finance, the Miami-based company they jointly owned.

Between January 2018 and September 2021, Niembro and Ramirez fraudulently induced the bank’s board and comptroller to purchase at least 47 promissory notes totaling approximately $25.3 million from Nodus Finance, allowing the men to use proceeds from the transactions for themselves, according to the Justice Department.

Previous court records showed that money from the transactions was used to pay for personal mortgages, credit-card bills and private investments.

By early March 2023, Puerto Rico’s Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions had informed Nodus that it would be placed into liquidation. Prosecutors said Niembro and Ramirez then caused the bank to accept a loan portfolio from Nodus Finance to pay down debt stemming from the 47 promissory notes.

Ramirez, 60, of Miami, pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in connection with the same scheme. As part of his plea agreement, he agreed to forfeit at least $13.6 million. He has not yet been sentenced. His attorney asked the court to schedule his sentencing after Niembro’s, noting that Ramirez has been cooperating with prosecutors and that the government filed a sealed motion seeking sentencing consideration for his assistance.

Scheme to evade Venezuela sanctions

Niembro’s criminal conduct also extended to U.S. sanctions on Venezuela, prosecutors said.

Between 2021 and 2023, Niembro conspired with others to carry out prohibited financial transactions with a person designated by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, or OFAC, for providing material support to Venezuela’s state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA.

The Justice Department did not identify the sanctioned individual in its announcement.

The individual’s company owed Nodus about $2.5 million on a loan that predated the sanctions. Prosecutors said Niembro and the sanctioned person devised a plan under which Nodus would foreclose on the person’s home in Southampton, New York.

The bank obtained OFAC authorization to foreclose on the property. But Niembro and the sanctioned individual separately entered into what prosecutors described as a “private” agreement to have Nodus sell the property back to the person for $4 million through a front company.

That transaction was prohibited under U.S. sanctions and had not been licensed by OFAC, according to the Justice Department.

“The defendant’s scheme didn’t stop at fraud; it extended into conspiring to evade U.S. sanctions designed to protect our national security,” said Charles Miller, acting special agent in charge of IRS Criminal Investigation’s Florida field office.

Hundreds of depositors caught in collapse

For Nodus customers, the criminal prosecutions follow years of uncertainty over money trapped inside the failed institution.

Nodus had become particularly popular among Venezuelans seeking to hold and transfer money outside their country. As U.S. sanctions on Venezuela expanded, many conventional banks became reluctant to accept Venezuelan customers, leaving institutions such as Nodus among the relatively few alternatives available to them.

By 2024, an estimated $80 million belonging to depositors remained trapped at the bank, according to previous Miami Herald reporting. Many of the customers were Venezuelans, including some living in South Florida, while others were scattered across Latin America and Europe.

The losses were particularly painful because Nodus was chartered as an international bank in Puerto Rico, meaning its deposits were not insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

“There are not enough words for what I feel,” Adelaida Cedeño, a Venezuelan businesswoman who is living in Spain and had about $35,000 deposited at Nodus, told the Miami Herald in 2024. “They kept feeding us lies from the beginning, and now there is not a person that would pick up the phone or answer an email, I feel like a victim of fraud.”

Cedeño, who relied on Nodus to conduct transactions for her international trade business, said at the time that the bank’s closure threatened her business and her accumulated assets.

Nodus had also established a presence in South Florida. In 2010, it created Nodus Finance, which provided small-business loans from an office on Brickell Avenue in Miami.

The bank’s troubles intensified after the Treasury Department determined in October 2022 that it had violated U.S. sanctions involving Venezuela. Unable to continue normal operations, Nodus entered a liquidation process supervised by Puerto Rico’s Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions.

Puerto Rican regulators subsequently identified payments that were made to directors and shareholders and that they said were inconsistent with the liquidation plan, along with transactions that involved people connected to the bank, presented conflicts of interest and placed Nodus in a “dangerous position.”

Regulators eventually stripped the bank’s shareholders of their ability to participate actively in the liquidation and said they were considering remedies and sanctions to address harm suffered by depositors because of the diversion of funds.

At the time, lawyers representing Nodus customers told the Herald that depositors feared they would recover only a fraction of their money.

“The losers were the account holders,” Carlos Calderon, an attorney representing several Venezuelan Nodus clients, said in 2024.