Alex Saab

Alex Nain Saab Morán (born 21 December 1971)[3] is a Colombian-born Venezuelan businessman,[4][5] who has served as the Venezuela's Minister of Industry and National Production since 18 October 2024.Saab was the subject of journalistic investigations for conducting businesses estimated at US$135 million with the Venezuelan government,[6] while other Colombian businessmen had stopped exporting to Venezuela due to uncertainty regarding payments and tight exchange controls.On 8 May 2019, the Office of the Attorney General of Colombia indicted Saab with charges of money laundering, concert to commit crimes, illicit enrichment, fictitious exports and imports, and aggravated fraud for events related to his Shatex company.According to the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), in 2009 Saab and his business partner Álvaro Pulido won "an overvalued government contract to build 25,000 units of low-income housing for three or four-times the worth of the original construction cost.[44] On 28 November 2011, Saab's Bogota-based company Fondo Global de Construccion (Global Construction Fund) signed an agreement with the Venezuelan government,[45][13] which resulted in a contract of US$685 million for the construction of prefabricated homes in Venezuela as part of la Gran Misión Vivienda housing programme,[39] The signing was attended by presidents Juan Manuel Santos and Hugo Chávez,[45][13] and Venezuela's then Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro.[46][14] In August 2015, a tiny trucking and trading firm, Trenaco, headquartered in Switzerland but largely run out of Colombia, won a contract from Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA), worth around $4.5 billion, for a drilling project in the Orinoco Belt, the world's largest crude oil reserve.[50][51][52] Following the publication, Armando.info and the journalists were threatened and had their personal information shared on social media, and Saab brought a lawsuit alleging continued defamation of reputation and aggravated injury charges, which carry a prison sentence of up to six years, leading the reporters to flee Venezuela.[59][56][57][58] On 1 December 2019, Armando.info published an investigation reporting that nine members of Venezuela's opposition-controlled National Assembly (see 2017 Venezuelan constitutional crisis) intervened in Saab and Carlos Lizcano, another businessman linked with the government and the CLAP program.[61][62][63] In September 2020 authorities in Liechtenstein started investigating Alex Saab on embezzlement charges related to CLAP public funds, sending a request for assistance to Switzerland.[66] Colombian journalist Gerardo Reyes, Pulitzer Prize recipient and Univisión's investigation team director, published in 2021 his book Alex Saab with the Editorial Planeta [es], based on 120 interviews.[67] In 2016, Reuters reported that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had been investigating companies owned by Saab and Álvaro Pulido on suspicion of money laundering from the illegal trafficking of cocaine from Colombia.[68] The Colombian Prosecution and the Directorate of Criminal Investigation and Interpol (DIJIN) issued arrest warrants on 24 September 2018 against seven people, including Alex Saab, charged with asset laundering worth US$25 billion between 2004 and 2011, and planned to carry out an operation the following day.After an investigation, a tip by an anonymous informant and an extortation complaint filed by a trusted person by Saab, the Colombian authorities identified Andrés Pinto as responsible; on 11 October he was arrested in Bogotá and indicted by the Prosecution with bribery and illegal violation of communications or correspondence of an official nature.[19] On 25 July 2019, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of Florida charged Saab and Pulido with money laundering of up US$350 million related to a 2011-15 scheme to pay bribes to take advantage of Venezuela's government-set exchange rate.According to a statement by Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, "The corruption network that operates the CLAP program has allowed Maduro and his family members to steal from the Venezuelan people.They use food as a form of social control, to reward political supporters and punish opponents, all the while pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars through a number of fraudulent schemes.Álvaro Enrique Pulido, identified as Saab's associate, was also sanctioned, in both cases for ""exploiting two of Venezuela's public programs that were established to provide poor Venezuelans with affordable food and housing", saying that "They both benefited from improperly awarded contracts, in which promised goods were delivered at highly inflated prices.[81] The US deployed the Navy cruiser USS San Jacinto off Cape Verde from November to December 2020, on a secret mission to "deter Venezuela and Iran from plotting to spirit Mr. Saab away from the island".[86] Shortly after his detention, on 14 June, the foreign affairs minister appointed by Maduro, Jorge Arreaza, tweeted in support of Alex Saab, labeling his arrest as "arbitrary" and "illegal".The government designed a communication campaign to build an alternative narrative of Saab's affair, showing him as an ally entrepreneur with diplomatic powers that with his efforts had managed to evade economic sanctions and made possible the arrival of food and industrial parts to Venezuela.[90] As a response to a BuzzFeed News and the Digital Africa Research Lab (DigiAfricaLab) investigation, Twitter suspended over 1,500 accounts in April 2021 for manipulating the #FreeAlexSaab hashtag, a hashtag used since mid-January as part of a campaign by a Nigerian public relations firm and a United Kingdom-based nonprofit called Digital Good Governance for Africa that paid influencers to tweet about Saab in an effort to sway public opinion and court proceedings in Nigeria and Cape Verde.[91] In June 2021, the platform Cazadores de Fake News concluded that a marketing company called PromoCoreGH was leading an astroturfing campaign in Ghana in support of Saab, after analyzing 151,725 tweets and fifty Twitter accounts.[96] On 30 November 2020, the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Court of Justice ordered Cape Verde to grant house arrest to Alex Saab.[107][108][109] In June 2021, the United Nations Human Rights Committee asked Cape Verde to suspend Saab's extradition and to ensure he has access to specialised medical care chosen by him.The documents state that, as part of the cooperation agreement with the American authorities, Saab wired over $10 million obtained through said operations to the DEA and held several meetings with agents and prosecutors in Colombia and Europe.However, during this hearing, prosecutors stated that it was time for them to be made public and downplayed any dangers, saying that Saab's legal team had not taken them up on an offer to assist his family in leaving Venezuela.Camilla Fabri, Saab's wife, also rejected on Twitter that cooperation took place, declared that the U.S. was "brazenly lying, like it did with Russia and Iraq" and that her husband "would never harm Venezuela".[31][127] On 7 November, prosecutors presented documents casting doubt on defense evidence to argue that Saab, showing a printed copy of the Official Gazette of Venezuela edition No.6,373 from 26 April 2018 obtained from the United States Library of Congress that contradicted an electronic version introduced by the defense reportedly showing that by presidential decree Saab had been appointed special envoy.