Alex Saab, Maduro's alleged figurehead, was a DEA informant

Alex Saab, during a Miami court hearing in December 2021. DANIEL PONTET (Reuters)

Alex Saab, the alleged figurehead of Nicolás Maduro and influential chavismo business operator, was secretly hired by the DEA (United States Drug Enforcement Administration) in 2018 to collaborate with the US Administration and He provided information about the bribes he paid to officials of the Venezuelan regime, according to court documents cited by the Associated Press.

That information, revealed within the process that is being carried out against him in Miami, indicates that the Colombian businessman lost 10 million dollars within the framework of the cooperation agreement with the US, which included several meetings with US law enforcement in his Colombia. hometown and elsewhere.

What is not clear is why the prosecution is now making these meetings with the US security forces public, since previously they had tried to keep them secret, fearing that both Saab and part of his family who are still in Venezuela suffered retaliation.

Handcuffed and wearing a beige prison suit, Saab appeared Wednesday before a Miami court, where the Prosecutor's Office and the businessman's defense discussed the issue of the accused's alleged diplomatic immunity, which is being studied in an appeals court in Atlanta, Georgia. , according to the Efe news agency.

The judge scheduled this Wednesday for October 11 the trial against Saab.

According to the data revealed by the prosecutors, the millionaire had an agreement with the US agency for which he should have turned himself in on May 30, 2019. Since he did not, the US broke the deal it had with Saab and accused the then-fugitive of laundering of 350 million dollars as a result of transactions carried out in 2011 for the purchase of materials in Ecuador with the supposed objective of building houses in Venezuela.

The operation was carried out through fictitious contracts and shell companies and not a brick was raised with the money, according to the investigations.

When Saab made a transfer for this business to US bank accounts, the first alert went off that ended with him in handcuffs in the US.

The United States considers Saab a key figure for the Government of Nicolás Maduro, for whom he designed a complex network of corruption through companies and operations that allowed him to evade the sanctions imposed by the US Administration.

In mid-October, the 49-year-old businessman was extradited from Cape Verde, where he had been detained since June 12, 2020, to the United States, where a Miami judge dismissed in November seven of the eight charges he faced for what he only He will be tried for conspiracy to launder money in the United States, which carries 20 years in prison, the maximum sentence allowed for extradition to proceed.

For the Nicolás Maduro regime, the US maneuver was a full-fledged “kidnapping” of Saab, “in complicity with the Cape Verde authorities, who arbitrarily tortured and held him prisoner for 491 days, without an arrest warrant or due process”, an information that they attributed to the family of the businessman.

According to prosecutors, the first interrogation with agents from the DEA and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) took place in the Colombian capital, Bogotá, over two days in August 2016. Other meetings followed in which Saab was represented by prosecutors. Colombian and American officials and in 2018 was hired as a cooperating source after telling agents he had paid bribes to Venezuelan officials, none of whom were named in the documents unsealed Wednesday, the AP reports.

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