El Salvador’s top prosecutor has effectively halted a money-laundering investigation into a Venezuela-financed oil venture whose funds flowed into bank accounts linked to President Nayib Bukele, El País reported. 

The inquiry centers on Alba Petróleos de El Salvador, a mixed-economy company founded in 2006 by a group of municipalities and run by leaders of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the leftist party historically allied with Venezuela’s government, the newspaper said. 

Roughly 60% of Alba Petróleos’ shares belong to PDV Caribe S.A., a subsidiary of Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, and that Venezuelan oil money underwrote the company’s expansion into a web of affiliated firms and accounts, according to the report. 

Documents from El Salvador’s Attorney General’s Office show that Bukele received about $3.3 million, personally and through three companies tied to his family group, originating from Venezuelan oil funds, El País reported. Two former prosecutors with direct knowledge of the case told the newspaper that, as of December, there had been no progress in pursuing the probe. 

“Not a single sheet of paper has moved in that file since Delgado arrived at the Attorney General’s Office,” one of the individuals said in the report. The second prosecutor similarly described the case as stalled.

The attorney general, Rodolfo Delgado, is a trusted ally of Bukele and has frozen the investigation, El País reported. 

The case began under then–attorney general Raúl Melara, who opened the investigation in 2019 as his office probed Bukele’s administration for alleged corruption and purported arrangements with the MS-13 and Barrio 18 gangs, according to El País. 

On May 31, 2019, one day before Bukele took office, prosecutors raided the offices of Alba Petróleos El Salvador SEM and 27 other companies connected to the Alba group, including Alba Alimentos S.A., Alba Gas S.A., and Inversiones Valiosas S.A. (Inverval), the report said.

Three months later, in September 2019, Salvadoran outlet Revista Factum published documents seized in the raids indicating that Bukele received $1.9 million from Inverval in his own name and another $1.4 million through two family-owned companies, Starlight and Obermet.

Read more at El País