A fugitive businessman accused of acting as a money launderer for Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime was on Saturday extradited to the US from Cape Verde, the US Department of Justice said.
The agency said in a statement that Alex Saab was due to appear in court on Monday in Florida and expressed “admiration” to Cape Verde authorities for their help in the case.
Venezuela reacted furiously, suspending talks with the US-backed opposition on ending the country’s political and economic crisis.
Photo: AP
Saab, a Colombian national, and his business partner, Alvaro Pulido, are charged in the US with running a network that exploited food aid destined for Venezuela, an oil-rich nation mired in an acute economic crisis.
They are alleged to have moved US$350 million out of Venezuela into accounts they controlled in the US and other countries. The two risk up to 20 years in prison.
Saab, who also has Venezuelan nationality and a Venezuelan diplomatic passport, was indicted in July 2019 in Miami for money laundering, and was arrested during a plane stopover in Cape Verde off the coast of West Africa in June last year.
Venezuela’s opposition has described Saab as a frontman doing shady dealings for the regime of Maduro.
Colombian President Ivan Duque praised Saab’s extradition.
“The extradition of Alex Saab is a triumph in the fight against the drug trafficking, asset laundering and corruption that the dictatorship of Nicolas Maduro has fostered,” Duque wrote on Twitter.
Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who is recognized as the country’s acting president by the US and more than 50 other countries, also welcomed the move.
“We Venezuelans, who have seen justice kidnapped for years, respect and celebrate the system of justice in democratic countries like Cape Verde,” he wrote on Twitter.
Cape Verde agreed last month to extradite Saab to the US, despite protests from Venezuela.
Venezuela said that Saab had been abducted by Washington.
“Venezuela denounces the kidnapping of the Venezuelan diplomat Alex Saab by the government of the United States in complicity with the authorities in Cape Verde,” the Caracas government said in a statement.
Venezuelan Congress Speaker Jorge Rodriguez said that the government would not attend the fourth round of talks with the opposition due to start on Sunday in Mexico City “as a deep expression of our protest against the brutal aggression” against Saab.
Rodriguez leads the government delegation for the negotiations and had hoped to make Saab one of its members until his arrest.
Venezuela had called Saab’s arrest in Cape Verde “arbitrary” and said he experienced “mistreatment and torture” at the hands of the Cape Verde authorities.
Last month, Roberto Deniz, a journalist who has covered Saab’s story for the Venezuelan investigative news site Armando.info, said that the regime in Caracas was desperate to get him released.
“It is clear that there is a lot of fear, not only because he may reveal information about bribes, about the places where money was moved and the inflated pricing,” Deniz said, but also because Saab “was the bridge for many of these deals that the Maduro regime is beginning to carry out with other allied countries.”
Former Venezuelan attorney general Luisa Ortega, who broke with the regime and fled the country, said that Saab was “the main figurehead of the regime,” adding that she herself had passed on evidence in the case to “some authorities.”
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