Former Venezuelan industry minister Alex Saab, a close ally of deposed president Nicolas Maduro, was expelled to the United States on Saturday for a second time, Venezuelan officials said in a statement.
“The deportation measure was adopted in consideration of the fact that the aforementioned Colombian citizen is involved in the commission of various crimes in the United States of America, as is public, well-known and reported,” the statement said.
A Colombia-born businessman, Saab had become close to Venezuela’s government in the final years of leftist firebrand Hugo Chavez’s 1999-2013 presidency and then managed a vast import network for Maduro’s administration.
He was first arrested in Cape Verde in 2020 over money laundering and corruption claims and extradited to the United States the following year, but he was released in 2023 as part of a prisoner exchange with Venezuela.
Maduro appointed Saab to his cabinet the following year, but shortly after the US captured Maduro in a Caracas raid this past January, interim president Delcy Rodriguez dismissed him from all his posts.
While the extradition of a Venezuelan citizen is technically prohibited under the constitution, the country’s migration authority determined that Saab was a Colombian national and ordered him “deported” to the United States. (AFP)
