Maduro ally Saab extradited to US
Faces money laundering charges
MIAMI » A top fugitive close to Venezuela’s socialist government has been put on a plane to the U.S. to face money laundering charges, a senior U.S. official confirmed Saturday.
Alex Saab was on a chartered Justice Department flight from Cape Verde, where he was arrested 16 months ago while making a stop on the way to Iran for what Nicolas Maduro’s government later described as a diplomatic humanitarian mission.
Saab’s arrival to the U.S. is bound to complicate relations between Washington and Caracas, possibly disrupting fledgling talks between Maduro’s government and its U.S.-backed opposition taking place in Mexico.
Maduro last month blasted the U.S. for the “kidnapping” and “torture” of Saab, a businessman from Colombia who prosecutors say amassed a fortune wheeling and dealing on behalf of the socialist government, which faces heavy U.S. sanctions.
American authorities have been targeting Saab for years, believing he holds numerous secrets about how Maduro, the president’s family and his top aides siphoned off millions of dollars in government contracts for food and housing amid widespread hunger in oil-rich Venezuela.
However his defenders, including Maduro’s government as well as allies Russia and Cuba, consider his arrest illegal and maintain that Saab was a diplomatic envoy of the Venezuelan government and as such possesses immunity from prosecution while on official business.
In a statement Saturday, Venezuela’s government again denounced the “kidnapping” of Saab by the U.S. government “in complicity with authorities in Cabo Verde.”
“The government of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela repudiates this grave violation of human rights against a Venezuelan citizen, invested as a diplomat and representative of our country before the world,” the statement said.
The argument failed to persuade Cape Verde’s Constitutional Court, which last month authorized his extradition after a year of wrangling by Saab’s legal team.
Federal prosecutors in Miami indicted Saab in 2019 on money-laundering charges connected to an alleged bribery scheme that pocketed more than $350 million from a low-income housing project for the Venezuelan government.
Separately, Saab had been sanctioned by the previous Trump administration for allegedly utilizing a network of shell companies spanning the globe to hide huge profits from no-bid, overvalued food contracts obtained through bribes and kickbacks.