Alex Saab, an alleged mastermind of the Venezuelan regime’s epic corruption, was re-extradited to the U.S. this week — and the Venezuelan journalist who exposed those crimes, and has paid for it with exile, believes much more about Saab's schemes will be brought out now.
Saab had been poised to stand trial in Miami in 2023, after originally being extradited to the U.S. by Cape Verde where he'd been arrested during a flight refueling stop. But the Biden administration pardoned and released him that year in exchange for U.S. prisoners held in Venezuela.
Now — after the U.S. arrested and removed Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro in January — acting Venezuelan President Delcy Rodríguez has sent Saab back to the U.S.
This week the Justice Department charged Saab in Miami anew "in a sprawling international money laundering conspiracy" tied to billions of dollars in Venezuelan embezzlement plots spanning more than a decade.
"In Saab's new U.S. trial, I think we're going to learn many more things we still don't know about how he was able to carry out these schemes," Roberto Deniz, the investigative reporter at Armando.info who first uncovered Saab's alleged dealings a decade ago, told WLRN from Bogotá, Colombia.
Because of his reporting on Saab, Deniz was forced into exile in Colombia in 2018 by Maduro's regime, for whom Saab allegedly played the role of funds embezzler and launderer involving contracts ranging from oil to housing to food as well.
U.S. prosecutors could charge Saab because so much of his alleged financial malfeasance — an estimated $350 million of it — coursed through U.S.-linked banks and other agencies. Still, Biden's 2023 pardon of Saab raises questions regarding what the Colombian-born businessman can still legally be tried for in the U.S.
READ MORE: Why Alex Saab's extradition to Miami threatens Venezuela's kleptocracy in Caracas
Either way, Deniz is confident Saab will cooperatively spill more information to U.S. prosecutors than he had before about the Maduro regime's criminal practices, knowing that the Trump administration will have no intention of releasing him this time.
"I'm of course very happy to see him back in U.S. custody," said Deniz, who was devastated when Saab was released back into Maduro's arms in 2023.
"I think now we'll get more to the bottom of how he could have wielded so much power under Maduro's rule. There is potentially a mountain of new documents" since 2023.
Dick Gregorie, a former U.S. prosecutor in Miami, told WLRN in 2021 that Saab "is the master of trade-based money laundering, and Venezuela has been robbed blind with every transaction that he does."
Deniz first uncovered that alleged criminality in 2016 in a report on how one of Saab's front companies gamed Venezuelan contracts for a subsidized food program known as CLAP — charging the government inflated prices for cheap, deficient goods like contaminated powdered milk, bribing officials to look the other way and then laundering his and their profits from the scheme through shell entities set up in countries as far flung as Bulgaria.
Deniz also exposed how Saab allegedly engineered similar scams for Venezuela's state-run oil monopoly, PDVSA — essentially helping to bankrupt the industry Venezuela's economy relied on, which in turn led to the worst humanitarian crisis in modern South American history.
As a result, Deniz was the subject of a 2024 PBS Frontline documentary, A Dangerous Assignment: Uncovering Corruption in Maduro's Venezuela.
Deniz said he's confident Saab's re-extradition will have a chilling effect on the Venezuelan government officials and business persons who allegedly partnered with Saab all those years.
"Those people should definitely be worried now," Deniz said, "because Delcy Rodríguez has to keep the Trump administration happy to a certain extent, and that means dismantling some of the Maduro regime corruption structures."
Those who might feel targeted, he noted, include the feared Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello, and the former Venezuelan Treasurer Carlos Erik Malpica Flores, the nephew of Maduro's wife, Cilia Flores, who is already on the U.S.'s Specially Designated Nationals (SDN) list of corrupt persons barred from doing business with Americans.
Still, despite Saab’s new extradition, Deniz doesn’t feel it’s safe yet for him to return to Venezuela.
"At the same time I don't think we should be naive about how much Delcy intends to reform," he said. "For the moment I remain very pessimistic because I still don't see real political change or opening in Venezuela, especially evidence of a more independent judicial system."
Most Venezuelans, both in-country and in the diaspora, also say they feel frustrated with the slow pace of re-democratization — there is still no indication of when new elections will be held, and opposition leader María Corina Machado remains in exile — and fear President Donald Trump's focus on acquiring Venezuela's oil reserves, the world's largest, is allowing Rodríguez and the holdovers from Maduro's regime to buy time and stay in power.
