Passports, 7 thousand citizenships granted and the Lebanese tycoon in business with Maduro appears –

Rita Cavallaro

07 maggio 2024

A Lebanese tycoon appears in the Passportopoli scandal in Venezuela, linked to the Maduro regime and with relatives close to Hezbollah. He is the new Italian citizen Majed Khalil Mazjoub, the 54-year-old Lebanese-Venezuelan businessman who last March 15 requested, and obtained together with eight other family members, recognition of Italian citizenship by descent. Certified in a family tree reconstruction form, which establishes the blood right in the ancestor Giuseppe Panfilio Miliani, an Italian born on June 1, 1850 in Poggio di Marciana, a small village on the Island of Elba from which the man would be he then left for Caracas, where on 18 July 1884 he married a Venezuelan. Their son would only have daughters and, over the generations, the surname was lost. This is why there is no trace of our country in the Khalil Mazjoub family. But according to the Demographic Services office (Register, civil status and citizenship) of the Italian consulate in Caracas, the Lebanese has Italian blood, so he and his entire family unit are entitled to a passport.

Now, however, further investigations are underway into those practices, following investigations into an alleged purchase and sale of citizenships. The Farnesina inspectors, who carried out a check on 12 April at the Consulate accompanied by carabinieri and financiers, among the more than seven thousand requests accepted in the last four months have closed the circle on 23 cases processed. The suspicion, yet to be ascertained, is that those lineages do not correspond to the truth, behind which there might also be a theft of the identity of a man who died in the mid-19th century, thanks to which the same lineage might be established. In the 23 files being sifted by the investigators, there are nine of the citizenship of the Lebanese tycoon’s family. A controversial figure, that of Majeb, whose visa was suspended by the US State Department in June 2004, due to his participation, through a company he owned, in the “systematization of the intelligence section of the Venezuelan army”, wrote the Miami Herald.

The list of his companies is long, including in tax havens, which have allowed the Lebanese to accumulate a fortune under the protection of the revolution, in the shadow of the Chávez and Maduro regimes. Together with his brother Khaled, communications director of the Sheikh Ibrahim Bin Abdulaziz mosque in Caracas and believed to be a fervent Islamist (also a new Italian citizen), he would have enjoyed many commercial agreements also with Evo Morales in Bolivia, as emerges from an investigation by 2017 conducted by a Bolivian senator. Furthermore, the Khalil Mazjoubs have a close relationship with the former Lebanese finance minister Ali Hassan Khalil, sanctioned in the past by the Office for Foreign Assets Control at the US Treasury Department due to his “material support for Hezbollah”. and for other corruption charges. Many shadows around the tycoon, but no judicial pending. Because the entrepreneur cares regarding his own honor, so much so that he engaged in a tug-of-war for defamation, which ended in an economic agreement, with Fox News. The television network had claimed in a report that the tycoon and other Venezuelans had contributed to rigging the 2020 presidential election once morest Donald Trump.