Public service: the Asset Recovery Commission (2019–2020)

By Magín Eduardo Blasi Blanchard — Miami, FL

I have never been a politician. I am an entrepreneur. But in 2019, when the Venezuelan interim government led by Juan Guaidó was recognized by the United States and by most of the country's democratic parties, I was asked for technical support on a very concrete task: identifying and organizing the assets the Chávez–Maduro dictatorship held abroad in the name of the Republic.

What it actually was

My brother, Fernando Blasi — also an entrepreneur, not a politician — accepted a public-service role as business affairs officer at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. He asked me to contribute my operational experience to help organize the asset recovery commission. We worked with several U.S. agencies to build an asset identification system, a public web platform, and coordination with Bolivia, where Venezuela owned a bank, an oil and gas company, an electricity generation company and several media assets.

What it was not

In parallel, a YouTube channel known for its polemical track record published a fabricated accusation involving the interim government in a supposed Petrocaribe asset operation, and pointed at me — with no evidence — in an alleged bribery scheme. The "evidence" was a plain white bond-paper document of unknown authorship. The subsequent chain of retransmissions — replicated by outlets aligned with the Maduro regime and then amplified through Caracas correspondents of U.S. media — is publicly traceable.

Why I write this here

Because the noise generated in 2020 still surfaces when someone searches for my name. I prefer to leave the full record, in my own voice, on my own site, so that anyone who wants to understand what happened has access to the real context — not only to the latest repetition.