Alex Saab, the key man in U.S.-Venezuela prisoner swap, made millions from Maduro regime

Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman, is something of an international man of mystery.

In the sordid annals of Venezuelan corruption, he’s known as the ultimate fixer, amassing a fortune off his dealings with the Caracas government while hiding millions in the United States, Europe and other parts of the world, authorities say.

A few years before his arrest, he was even working as a “double agent,” they say.

Saab, 52, spent more than two years in a federal lockup in Miami after being charged in a $350 million money-laundering case. Early Wednesday morning, he was suddenly released as part of an official prisoner swap between the U.S. and Venezuelan governments. For Saab’s freedom, Venezuela released 10 Americans as well as 20 Venezuelan political prisoners.

Several people familiar with the exchange were struck by the lopsided transaction in terms of the numbers. But they pointed out that Saab had a bounty of insider information about high-ranking officials in the government of President Nicolás Maduro, from the embezzlement of billions of dollars to vast investments around the world. If Saab had cut a plea deal in the Miami case and started dishing dirt on Maduro and other top Venezuelan officials, it could have cost them dearly.

“It seems like a lot for one guy,” said a U.S. law enforcement official, who was not authorized to speak about the prisoner swap. “It shows how valuable he is to them.”

Saab was among dozens of Venezuelan officials, businessmen and contractors who have been accused in Miami federal court of collectively stealing billions of dollars from their government in bribery schemes allegedly involving Maduro, the late president Hugo Chávez, and other high-ranking officials with Venezuela’s national oil company, PDVSA. Many, including two former national treasurers, have been convicted through plea deals or at trial, but many others, such as TV mogul tycoon Raul Gorrin, are still at large. Maduro himself was charged in a drug-trafficking case in 2020, alleging his administration provided protection for the Cartel of the Suns run by high-ranking military officials.

For his part, Saab has been on a legal odyssey for years.

In 2020, Saab was detained by Cape Verde authorities on an Interpol red notice. After his arrest, Saab claimed to be a special envoy traveling for Maduro to Iran on a gold-for-gasoline trade mission. His extradition from the island off the coast of Africa to the United States in 2021 was fraught with problems. Once Saab was transferred here, he deployed a legal team to fight the indictment by saying he had “diplomatic immunity” from Maduro — a claim that he initially lost but was on appeal as he awaited federal trial in Miami.

On Wednesday, Saab’s legal team said that if he had lost his immunity claim before the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which was still pending, he was going to trial in Miami federal court.

“There is no question that he was acting as a diplomat” when he was arrested in Cape Verde en route to Iran, said lawyer Joseph Schuster, who worked on Saab’s case with attorneys Neil Schuster, David Rivkin and Celeste Siblesz Higgins. “If it did not go the way it should go in the 11th Circuit, he was prepared to go to trial. He was not going to plead guilty.”

According to an indictment filed in 2019, Saab was charged along with Colombian national Alvaro Pulido Vargas, 55, a fugitive. The pair was accused of paying off Venezuelan government officials to obtain contracts to supply building materials for low-income housing projects between November 2011 and September 2015.

But over the past decade, Saab also played the role of a double agent.

While operating out of Venezuela, Saab worked as a confidential informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and turned over millions of his profits to the DEA before he failed to surrender in 2019, according to a federal court document.

Saab started communicating with DEA and FBI agents in Bogota, Colombia, about his planned cooperation in 2016. With his lawyers he continued those discussions with federal agents and prosecutors through June 2018, when he signed a “cooperating source agreement” with the DEA, the court document says.

For nearly a year, Saab reported paying bribes to Venezuelan officials to secure illicit food, housing and other contracts totaling hundreds of millions of dollars with the government. Saab communicated with DEA special agents “via telephone, text and voice messaging,” the document says, and he “engaged in proactive cooperation,” meaning he recorded conversations with co-conspirators targeted in the U.S. investigation.

Saab also made four wire transfers totaling more than $12 million of his Venezuelan contract profits to a U.S. bank account controlled by the DEA as part of his cooperation with the agency, the document says. But when Saab failed to surrender to the DEA by May 30, 2019, his cooperation deal as a federal informant ended.

Federal prosecutors in Miami shifted to targeting Saab in a money-laundering case filed that year. But as in so many investigations involving foreign nationals, capturing him would not be easy.

When he represented the Maduro government in the gold-for-oil trade mission to Iran, Saab’s plane made a stop for refueling in Cape Verde, where he was arrested on the Interpol red notice in June 2000. Over the next year, Saab fought his extradition, claiming he had diplomatic immunity as an envoy for the Venezuelan government.

At the time, U.S. officials were so concerned with the lengths Maduro would go to gain release of Saab that the Trump administration sent Navy ships to patrol Cape Verde’s coasts. Saab was extradited to the United States in October 2021 and continued to claim that he could not be charged with a crime in the U.S.

In December 2022 a federal judge denied his diplomatic immunity claim. With the backing of the Venezuelan government, Saab tried to persuade U.S. District Judge Robert Scola to dismiss the $350 million money laundering indictment filed against him in 2019, claiming he been designated as a “special envoy” for Venezuela the previous year and was therefore immune from prosecution.

But Scola accused the Venezuelan government of doctoring certain documents to make Saab appear as a legitimate diplomat.

“The Court is not convinced that the 2018 credential that Saab Moran relied on to support his claim to diplomatic status is legitimate nor is the Court convinced of its relation to his dealings in Iran,” Scola wrote, using the defendant’s full last name in his decision. “And, even if Saab Moran had truly been proclaimed to be a ‘special envoy’ in 2018, the evidence does not convince the Court that Saab Moran was traveling as anything more than a lay businessman to broker a deal when arrested in June of 2020.

“For these reasons alone, the Court finds that Saab Moran’s assertion of diplomatic immunity is a nonstarter. At the time he was arrested, Saab Moran truly was no diplomat at all.”