MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Businessman named by Washington as Maduro's frontman admits guilt in a Miami court

The change of plea hearing was set before Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida. Saab, 54, faced a single count carrying a maximum of twenty years in prison

Colombian businessman Alex Saab, identified by the US Treasury Department as Nicolás Maduro's principal frontman, pleaded guilty on Tuesday in a federal court in Miami to conspiracy to launder money linked to Venezuela's CLAP subsidized food program.

The change of plea hearing was set before Judge Kathleen Williams of the Southern District of Florida. Saab, 54, faced a single count carrying a maximum of twenty years in prison. His lawyer, Neil Schuster, declined to comment and the terms of the agreement with prosecutors were not immediately public. No sentencing date was known, nor whether the agreement involves any form of cooperation.

The indictment alleges that Saab and others set up a web of companies to bribe Venezuelan officials who controlled contracts for the Local Supply and Production Committee, the program created to distribute staples such as rice, corn flour and cooking oil cheaply amid hyperinflation. According to prosecutors, the scheme involved shell companies, falsified shipping records and the skimming of public contracts to import food from Colombia and Mexico. The indictment adds that when US sanctions made payments to suppliers difficult, those involved turned to selling crude from state oil company PDVSA and channeled the proceeds through bank accounts in the United States. The conduct attributed to third parties has not been proven.

This is not his first US case. Saab was arrested in June 2020 in Cape Verde during a refueling stop on a flight bound for Iran, and extradited in October 2021. That case, opened in 2019, accused him alongside fellow Colombian Álvaro Pulido of obtaining social housing contracts between 2011 and 2015 and moving some US$350 million out of Venezuela. In November 2021, a judge dismissed seven of the eight counts because the United States had assured Cape Verde during extradition that it would prosecute him on no more than one, in order to comply with the maximum sentence allowed under Cape Verdean law. That dismissal applied only to Saab. He pleaded not guilty to the remaining count.

That trial never took place. In December 2023, Saab left US custody in a prisoner swap between the governments of Joe Biden and Maduro, with presidential clemency. Venezuela released ten Americans, a fugitive former military contractor and some twenty political prisoners. Saab was received in Caracas by Maduro.

The current case rests on a different scheme from the one behind that release. Saab was deported to the United States in May by Venezuela's acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, in response to pressure from Washington, which has pursued the businessman for more than a decade. Maduro has been removed from power and awaits trial in the United States, where the presumption of innocence applies.

Saab was for years among the businessmen closest to the Venezuelan government, able to work around US sanctions, place crude and import supplies during the country's economic crisis.