On August 28, 2025, Francisco Antonio Convit Guruceaga’s name lit up feeds again. Former police commissioner Iván Simonovis said the Derwick Associates director—grandson of famed scientist Jacinto Convit and one of the Chávez-era “bolichicos”—escaped from SEBIN’s Helicoide detention center, where he’d been held since February. There was no official statement, but there were midnight raids on the homes of his mother and his right-hand man, rumors that he bolted the country with his family, and even a 24-hour detention of Antonio “El Potro” Álvarez for questioning. The consensus in Caracas’s rumor mill was blunt: Convit paid for the exit. The only open question was geography: the United States, where a federal case for laundering $1.2 billion awaits him? The Dominican Republic, where he could move freely? Spain, under the protective wing of former partner Alejandro Betancourt? While those guesses multiplied, the regime yanked house arrest from other high-profile defendants—Alejandro Arroyo, Bernardo Arosio, and Jesús Enrique Salazar—sending them back to SEBIN cells. Message received: if one bolts, everyone pays.
To understand Convit, you go back to the beginning of the group that vaulted him upward. Derwick Associates started as a perfect opportunist’s shell and became a privileged contractor during Hugo Chávez’s “electric emergency.” With only months on the Venezuelan corporate books, Derwick stacked up contracts—without tenders, with addenda and opacity—with Electricidad de Caracas (EDC), the CVG, and PDVSA to build thermal plants that, in far too many cases, were incomplete, delivered half-baked, or outfitted with rebuilt equipment sold as new at hefty markups. The “engineering” was sub-contracted to ProEnergy; the politics ran through padrinos. That’s where the core triad—Convit, Leopoldo Alejandro Betancourt, and Pedro Trebbau—hardened. Their bridge into the state grid was Javier Alvarado. “Bolichicos” said the rest: young, thin on track record, thick with access.
By 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice exposed the other face: a mammoth money-laundering case describing a PDVSA heist via exchange-rate arbitrage (2014–2015) that began at $600 million and doubled to $1.2 billion. Alongside Convit, the indictment lists a familiar circuit: José Vicente “Chente” Amparan Croquer (portrayed as a professional launderer), Carmelo Urdaneta (ex–Ministry of Oil legal adviser), Abraham Edgardo Ortega (ex–PDVSA executive director of finance, later a cooperator), Gustavo Hernández Frieri (a Colombian-American financier), Swiss banker Matthias Krull (who flipped and cooperated), and Uruguayan banker Marcelo Federico Gutiérrez Acosta y Lara, among others. The method is spelled out: squeeze the gap between the black-market dollar and the official rate to multiply capital in two hops, launder the proceeds through Miami real estate and dressed-up investment structures, and spray the gains across Miami, Panama, Switzerland, the UK, and the Bahamas. The file also sketches Convit’s style with one scene: November 2015, a meeting in his Caracas office with a U.S. government cooperator. On the table, “strategically,” a pistol. At his side, a German shepherd wearing a shock collar. “I can’t always control him,” he reportedly quipped. Theater, but effective.
In September 2018, Judge Kathleen M. Williams declared Convit and several co-defendants fugitives for failing to appear. Fugitive status didn’t cramp his lifestyle. In January 2020, SEBIN detained him in Maiquetía—or Margarita, depending on the version—and then released him almost immediately. Two names hovered over the revolving door: Diosdado Cabello and Douglas Rico, according to press accounts. In February 2025, another headline pulled him back into glare: a brawl at the Capital Sports Pádel Center with the bodyguards of merengue singer Omar Enrique. Days later, he was in custody. Investigative sources insisted the arrest wasn’t for the fight but for back-channel talks with U.S. officials to bargain his way out of the Miami case. Six months later, he was gone.
Convit’s corporate footprint extends beyond Derwick. He surfaced in Petrozamora (a PDVSA joint venture) and dove into horse racing through the Florida-based consortium El Capi Racing; in 2015, alongside brothers Carlos Luis and José Antonio Uzcátegui and other partners, he paid $2 million for the colt Glory or Nothing at Saratoga and $400,000 for another filly. The equestrian universe wasn’t incidental: his wife, Patricia Gabriela Ferrando de Convit, rides on Venezuela’s national equestrian team. Around that world, press reports linked him to attempts—alongside “El Potro” Álvarez and José Ángel Silva—to privatize the National Institute of Hippodromes via a hand-picked concession. It collapsed when the plan drew fire.
The Miami case adds mosaic tiles: sham contracts to justify transfers (including a PDF contract from Eaton Global Services Limited, a Hong Kong entity flagged in filings and linked in press to Raúl Gorrín), property seizures in Miami and Panama, and Krull’s cooperation naming Convit as a key client. Parallel reporting tracked an aggressive reputation-management front: Thor Halvorssen of Human Rights Foundation accused Derwick and Fusion GPS of campaigns to smear reporters who documented the group’s irregularities; in 2018, he sued Derwick’s principals and the American consultants in New York, alleging a conspiracy to silence him.
His social biography mattered, too. Married to Ferrando since 2008 (Venice wedding), Convit’s private life strayed into scandal: he’s been linked to ex–beauty queen Edymar Martínez Blanco, with allegations of laundering via ventures in Venezuela and Spain and the use of accounts in Panama, the Bahamas, and Barbados. Meanwhile, international sources placed Ferrando’s accounts in Switzerland. It’s the classic reflux of toxic money: out of Caracas, into private banking, luxury, horses, and clubs.
The constant, though, is simpler: whenever Convit seemed cornered, a door opened. In 2020, an express release. In 2025, a “made-for-the-system” arrest and a pay-to-go escape that embarrassed his old protectors. It’s the same pattern that carried him from the power-outage “emergency”—urgent contracts, adenda, used equipment sold as new—to PDVSA’s “Operation Money Flight”—rate arbitrage, professional launderers, bespoke bankers—and then to a comfortable clandestinity. The question isn’t why he fled; it’s how much he knows and whom he’s ready to sink when the pressure rises.
Today, as the Maduro government tightens the noose on high-profile defendants and drags some back to deep cells to prevent more negotiated exits, the Convit affair again shows the skeleton of the system: contracts without scrutiny, compliant banks, international operators, and a justice machine that alternates showy punishment with back doors. Grandson of a national scientific icon; power-sector contractor at 30; financial operator at 35; fugitive at 40; jail-breaker at 47. Francisco Convit’s timeline isn’t an anomaly—it’s a chronicle of power in Venezuela, where access beats any balance sheet. And once more, whoever pays the most, walks.
@lombardoven Alejandro Arroyo, Bernardo Arosio Hobaica y Jesús Enrique Salazar han vuelto a la cárcel esta semana por culpa de la fuga de Francisco Convit Guruceaga #fyp #venezuela #noticias ♬ Patio de la Cárcel (Tangos) - Omar Montes & Farruko