Alex Saab, the 54-year-old Colombian-born businessman who served as Nicolás Maduro's Minister of Industry and National Production, pleaded guilty on September 15 before U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams in the Southern District of Florida to one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. Saab agreed to forfeit $195 million in criminal proceeds and to cooperate fully with federal prosecutors, including testimony against four co-defendants whose identities remain sealed. His scheduled trial has been canceled.
Under the agreement, Saab faces a maximum 20 years, though prosecutors committed to recommending a sentence at the low end of federal guidelines, with further reductions contingent on the value of his cooperation. Defense attorney Neil Schuster declined to comment. U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones did not immediately respond to requests for comment. In court, Saab told Judge Williams he takes Zoloft and other medication daily for post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from his 2020 arrest in Cape Verde. No sentencing date has been set.
What prosecutors allege
According to the indictment, Saab and associates built a network of shell companies between 2015 and 2019 to bribe Venezuelan officials who controlled contracts for CLAP, the government's Local Committees for Supply and Production, which was designed to deliver rice, corn flour and cooking oil to Venezuelans during a period of hyperinflation and currency collapse. Prosecutors say the scheme also involved falsified shipping records for food imports from Colombia and Mexico, and access to billions of dollars tied to oil sales by state-run PDVSA, laundered through U.S. bank accounts. This is the architecture prosecutors describe: a humanitarian program allegedly weaponized for personal enrichment, using the same institutional channels meant to feed Venezuela's poorest.
Observers are reading: How Saab's sealed cooperation could expose the Rodríguez government's own financial arrangements with Washington.
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The architecture that remains
Saab's plea does not resolve who else profited from CLAP's diversion, nor whether his testimony reaches Maduro's cell in Brooklyn. What is confirmed is a forfeiture, a cooperation agreement and a canceled trial. What remains sealed, deliberately, is everything else.
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