At the center of the corruption and sanction-evasion scheme that enabled the Venezuelan regime to divert billions of dollars from state oil is a name relatively unknown outside the banking and sports worlds: Siri Evjemo-Nysveen. A Norwegian national, former executive of the Swiss bank MBaer Merchant Bank, and a prominent figure in high society, Evjemo-Nysveen has been a crucial element in the financial architecture designed by her husband, the sanctioned businessman Alessandro Bazzoni, for laundering money from PDVSA.
The Financial Face of an Illicit Empire
Evjemo-Nysveen joined the board of MBaer Merchant Bank in 2020, an institution founded by Michael Baer, great-grandson of the founder of the Julius Baer Group. From her position as vice president, she had direct access to the bank’s private banking operations and, according to multiple investigations, facilitated the opening of accounts for chavista operators, including Colonel Antonio Pérez Suárez, the family of former minister Tareck El Aissami, and Álvaro Pulido Vargas.
Beyond MBaer, Siri actively participated in the creation of Clareville Grove Capital LLP and CGC One Planet, two firms used to channel funds from Asia and the Middle East to Europe, employing shell structures. These companies played a crucial role in a money triangulation scheme via Dubai and London, exploiting regulatory loopholes and the high-level connections Evjemo-Nysveen maintained in the Swiss and British banking circuits.
Horses, Polo, and Money Laundering
Far from restricting herself to the financial sector, Siri Evjemo-Nysveen rolled out a strategy for wealth legitimization through sports. Together with Bazzoni, she owns the teams MT Vikings and Monterosso Polo Team, which have competed in high-profile tournaments such as the Cartier Queen’s Cup and the Prince of Wales’s Championship Cup, where they even faced Prince William’s team.
However, beyond the realm of sports, polo served as a vehicle for laundering money. According to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the National Crime Agency (NCA) in the UK, the couple utilized the buying and selling of competition horses—some valued at hundreds of thousands of dollars—as a facade to introduce illicit capital into Europe. The scheme involved acquiring the horses through Clareville Grove Capital, registering them under the names of circuit players, and subsequently reselling them, pocketing the profits in accounts controlled by Evjemo-Nysveen.
Among the names investigated by UK authorities are over 40 polo players, including Facundo Sola, Guillermo “Sapo” Caset, Ignacio Novillo Astrada, Juan Martín Nero, Lia Salvo, and other athletes from Britain, Argentina, and Uruguay who were part of this machinery. Some horses were seized from the Cowdray Park Polo Club, a property co-owned by Siri and Inez Bethell, a British influencer also linked to the scheme.
The Collapse of the House of Cards
In 2023, following the scandal of the PDVSA-Cripto case, MBaer quietly removed Siri’s name from its board. Leaked documents show that the banker was included in confidential emails regarding the bank’s capital increase, which also mentioned her husband, Bazzoni, despite being sanctioned by OFAC since 2021.
Their inclusion in the bank’s internal communications raised suspicions about the weaknesses of MBaer’s compliance mechanisms. Though the entity claims it does not operate with residents in the U.S., UK, or Germany, both Siri and Alessandro resided in London and conducted operations from that city.
Currently, Siri and Alessandro are detained in the UK due to a red notice from Interpol issued from Venezuela, while facing active investigations in Switzerland, the UK, and the United States. Their two main proxies, Erik Roveta and Germán Bonelli, have already been arrested in Greece and Argentina, respectively.
As investigations continue, Evjemo-Nysveen’s case serves as another example of how the European financial system can be infiltrated and exploited by operators of sanctioned regimes, as long as they have the right names, horses, and enough millions.