Alex Saab
Alex Nain Saab Morán (born 21 December 1971) is a Colombian-born Venezuelan businessman who served as Venezuela’s Minister of Industry and National Production from October 2024 to January 2026.
Overview
Alex Nain Saab Morán (born 21 December 1971) is a Colombian-born Venezuelan businessman who served as Venezuela’s Minister of Industry and National Production from October 2024 to January 2026. Saab was the subject of journalistic investigations for conducting businesses estimated at US$135 million with the Venezuelan government, while other Colombian businessmen had stopped exporting to Venezuela due to uncertainty regarding payments and tight exchange controls. Saab's name has appeared in multiple ICIJ leaks including the Panama Papers, Pandora Papers and the FinCEN Files. Saab was enriched by the materials supplier business of the Housing Mission in Venezuela. Armando.Info, a Venezuelan investigative journalist outlet, reported that Saab received US$159 million from the Venezuelan government to import housing materials between 2012 and 2013, but only delivered products worth US$3 million. He later sold food to Venezuela for more than US$200 million in a contract signed by President Nicolás Maduro. The food was later resold in Venezuela for 112% more than its original price. Saab has been investigated by Colombian authorities for allegedly laundering US$25 million between 2004 and 2011. 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. During the course of these investigations, his accounting auditors were arrested and charged by the prosecutor's office. Both Saab and his accountant were acquitted of the Colombian charges in May 2024. During a fuel stop at Cape Verde, Alex Saab was arrested while on his way from Venezuela to Iran on a business jet on 12 June 2020. Saab was arrested in accordance to an Interpol red notice in relation to his indictment in the United States, accused of money laundering. Saab's extradition to the United States was approved by the Barlovento Appeals Tribunal, Cape Verde's Supreme Court of Justice and its Constitutional Court. The Venezuelan government denied or ignored any relationship with Saab for years, but after his arrest in Cape Verde it started deploying a support campaign in favour of Saab and to prevent his extradition, using government social media accounts and filling Caracas with billboards, murals and graffitis asking for his release, organizing demonstrations in his support, and starting a YouTube series about him. He was extradited to the United States on 16 October 2021 and charged with eight counts of money laundering, accused of moving $350 million out of Venezuela into accounts controlled in the United States and other countries, as well as falsifying documents to obtain contracts for the construction of affordable housing. He faced up to twenty years in US prison. Maduro's government suspended negotiation talks with the political opposition as a response. According to court documents released in 2022, Saab became a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant in 2018, during which time he shared information about the bribes that he offered to Venezuelan officials and contracts with the government. In December 2023, Saab was released from jail to be sent back to Venezuela in exchange for ten American prisoners being held in Venezuela in a prisoner exchange. Saab was arrested in February 2026 in a joint operation by American and Venezuelan intelligence agencies after the United States strikes in Venezuela and capture of Nicolás Maduro. In May 2026, he was deported to the US.
Career
Alex Saab is the son of a Lebanese immigrant, Luis, who settled in the city of Barranquilla and opened various businesses, including Textiles Saab, finding success in Colombia's textile industry. Alex Saab attended the German School of Barranquilla, an elite private school. Saab began his career in Barranquilla at age 18, selling business promotional keychains and subsequently work uniforms. By the time he was 19, he had opened a T-shirt factory. In early 2000, he formed a network of export organisations with family members listed as officers. Saab joined a group of Colombian businessmen who were exporting merchandise to Colombia from Venezuela using the CADIVI currency system. According to a Univisión source, during this time Saab accumulated million dollar debts after the suspension of foreign exchange payments by the Venezuelan government, which in turn alleged that some businessmen in the country had cheated millions from the Cadivi system, although Saab was not accused of such fraud. Saab sued Univisión's journalist Gerardo Reyes in the US after Reyes reported on these issues. According to an investigation by Noticias Caracol, businessman César Ruiz Sandoval was a key player in Saab's network starting from 2008 and would reportedly receive financial compensation from companies linked to Saab, up to 260 million pesos from HSC Capital, Golden Sun Trading de Colombia, Promotora Dubera and other companies. Ruiz owned a company named Marmocol de Colombia that would later be called Criadero Porcino Casa Blanca which had a Saab company among its commercial references, Shatex. Ruiz is also named as a founder and as a shareholder of Soft Solutions (later named Intratex International), along with other partners of Alex Saab. César Ruiz was killed on 4 June 2022 and the Office of the Attorney General of Colombia would open an investigation on his murder. Saab was also enriched due to the materials supplier business of the Housing Mission in Venezuela. 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." From 2011, Saab worked with Maduro's stepsons, Walter, Yosser and Yoswal, known as Los Chamos, because of their access to Maduro and former Vice President Tareck El Aissami, to secure government contracts. On 28 November 2011, Saab's Bogota-based company Fondo Global de Construccion (Global Construction Fund) signed an agreement with the Venezuelan government, 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, The signing was attended by presidents Juan Manuel Santos and Hugo Chávez, and Venezuela's then Foreign Minister Nicolás Maduro. Saab's lawyer, Abelardo de la Espriella, said that Saab had no connection with the Global Construction Fund. Armando.Info, a Venezuelan investigative journalist outlet, reported that Saab received US$159 million from the Venezuelan government to import housing materials between 2012 and 2013, but only delivered products worth US$3 million. The company was investigated by Ecuador's government for alleged money laundering through false exports to Venezuela via Colombia; although Saab was not accused of wrongdoing, in 2013 Ecuadorian prosecutors alleged the company was used to launder more than $130 million, but the case was dropped after several years. A parallel investigation by Colombia's customs agency was dropped in 2014 when the investigator resigned and moved abroad due to death threats. On 18 November 2014, Antigua and Barbuda's prime minister Gaston Browne invited Saab to become special economic envoy to Venezuela, granting him Antiguan citizenship. He had a contract to build a factory in Antigua to make housing panels, but the factory never opened. Saab used the services of Mossack Fonseca, the legal firm at the center of the Panama Papers offshore financing scandal, to create companies abroad. Among these were Seafire Foundation, Lintel Overseas and PI Proment International Sociedad Anónima Kingstone Team Inc. Saab's lawyer said none of these companies were ever used. Among the companies there also was Group Grand Limited, of which Saab was co-owner of and was used to supply food to the Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP) programme. 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. After complaints from PDVSA's foreign partners, including Chevron and Rosneft, the deal collapsed by the start of 2016. Trenaco executives told Reuters that Saab had run the company since 2012–14. The company shared an address with Fondo Global, and executives said Saab worked alongside Carlos Gutiérrez, the son of a Colombian agricultural magnate, and Colombian businessman Alvaro Pulido. In 2019, Saab launched two legal cases in Miami against the Univision TV network for its reporting of his businesses. By 2020, Saab had moved his base of operations to Turkey.
Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP)
The Local Committees for Supply and Production (CLAP) programme, established in 2016, imports food for the poor in Venezuela in the context of the country's food shortages. Saab had sold food to Venezuela for more than US$200 million in a contract signed by President Nicolás Maduro through a registered company in Hong Kong. On 23 August 2017, the former Venezuelan attorney general, Luisa Ortega Díaz, said Alex Saab was the co-owner of the Mexican firm supplying food to CLAP, Group Grand Limited, along with Álvaro Pulido and Rofolfo Reyes, who Ortega claimed was "presumably President Nicolás Maduro". The food supplies have been sold through Group Grand Limited for 112% more than the original price in Mexico. Saab would have met Pulido in 2012, when he was dedicated to supplying the Saab company, but this activity would have stopped doing it in 2014. In 2018, the Venezuela government began paying for the CLAP imports using its gold resources. The US Treasury said the government was pressuring miners to sell Saab gold at an inflated market rate. "The gold would be flown to the United Arab Emirates and Turkey. Saab's company, Mulberry, based in Turkey, allegedly would help facilitate payments for the selling of gold and goods back to Venezuelan clients."
Armando.info investigation
In April and September 2017 four investigative journalists published reports in Venezuelan web portal Armando.info about inflated food prices within the CLAP initiative, exposing Saab's relationship with the Venezuelan government. The first report showed Saab's connections to Hong Kong-based Grupo Grand (including the listing of his son as a beneficiary and the company sharing an address with another of Saab's enterprises; Saab rejected the allegations) and that it charged the Venezuelan government prices far above the market rate. The second report investigated Luisa Ortega's allegations about the CLAP programme. A joint report between the Central University of Venezuela and Armando.info showed that milk powder supplied by Saab's company was not nutritious, having high levels of sodium, low levels of calcium and only 1/41 the protein of normal milk. 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. On 11 September 2018, the National Commission of Telecommunications (CONATEL) of Venezuela banned the Armando.info journalists from publishing information about Saab. In a document addressed to the journalist Roberto Deniz and signed by the general director of CONATEL, Vianey Miguel Rojas "forbids citizens Roberto Denis Machín, Joseph Poliszuk, Ewald Scharfenberg and Alfredo José Meza to publish and disseminate mentions that go against the honor and reputation of the citizen Alex Naím Saab" through digital media, specifically on the site Armando.info, "until the end of the current process in the case being pursued against said citizens". The ban was denounced by the Venezuelan National Press Workers' Union (SNTP). Since the reports, the Armando.Info site suffered massive cyber attacks, warning that the ban on mentioning Saab in successive investigation articles "increases the threat". Roberto Deniz rejected the sentence, recalling that after the publications the journalistic team had been threatened via Twitter and banned from leaving the country by the 11th Court in Caracas.
Operación Alacrán
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. The investigation reported that the implicated lawmakers had written letters of support to the United States Treasury and others to Lizcano, who authorities were investigating over his possible links to Saab. According to Armando.info, the lawmakers wrote the letters despite being aware of evidence that tied Lizcano to Saab. In addition, the portal pointed to José Brito as implicated in alleged acts of corruption to "cleanse the reputation" of Colombian businessmen linked to the Maduro government and the alleged network of embezzlement of CLAP social assistance funds.
Swiss investigation
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. On 14 September, United States authorities froze accounts in Liechtenstein belonging to Saab worth US$700 million.
Gerardo Reyes' book about Saab
Colombian journalist Gerardo Reyes, Pulitzer Prize recipient and Univisión's investigation team director, published in 2021 his book Alex Saab with the Editorial Planeta, based on 120 interviews. Reyes described Saab as a "super minister", saying that he had more tasks than any other member of Maduro's cabinet, and has written that the United States calculates that Saab's profits from the Venezuelan government are over a billion dollars.
DEA investigation and the FinCEN files
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. The FinCEN Files, published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists in 2020, revealed that from 2016 onwards banks had reported Saab to the U.S. Treasury's FinCEN financial crimes bureau for suspicious transactions from the Global Bank of Commerce in Antigua.
2018 foiled arrest operation
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. However, the operation was foiled after Eddie Andrés Pinto, a patrolman of the DIJIN who served as an interception analyst, alerted several members of the group about their arrests. As a response, Alex Saab escaped to Venezuela and his brothers, Luis Alberto and Amir, disconnected their cellphones and the authorities lost their track. After an investigation, a tip by an anonymous informant and an extortion 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. Pinto announced his intention to collaborate with the authorities. At the moment it was unknown if the indicted group and Saab contacted the DIJIN to leak information regarding the operation or if they were subject of extortion, and the Prosecution was evaluating if Pinto received benefits in exchange of the provided information. On 23 September 2018, one of Saab's lawyers filed a complaint with the prosecution for attempted extortion from a public official "who is providing confidential information about investigative proceedings against the Saab family using WhatsApp and Telegram messages, in exchange for some economic or labor purpose.” On 12 October, Andrés Pinto accepted the extortion charges that were indicted against him. According to the complaint in the audios and WhatsApp captures provided therein, Pinto requested COP 500 million in exchange for erasing all the information that existed on behalf of Saab, stating that "there was nothing that compromised Saab or his family", but that they "were going to be captured as a measure of pressure".
Colombian, US and Swiss criminal charges
On 8 May 2019, the Colombian prosecutors office charged Saab with crimes of money laundering, a concert to commit crimes, illicit enrichment, exports and fictitious imports and an aggravated fraud for events related to his Shatex company. Since September 2018, he is considered a fugitive in Colombia for failing to attend any judicial proceeding even with a firm arrest warrant. Saab was found not guity of the Colombian charges in May 2024. 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. In March 2021, after three years of investigation, Swiss prosecutors concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prosecute Saab for money laundering.
Meetings with U.S. officials
In November 2021 court records in the U.S. court case of an alleged ex-associate of Saab Bruce Bagley, (who has pled guilty to Laundering about US$2.5 million in deposits from overseas accounts that were controlled by Saab) claimed that an intermediary (later identified by Bagley as Jorge Luis Hernández) told Bagley the $2.5 million he received from Saab was to pay lawyers who were assisting Saab with his cooperation with the U.S. government, who in meetings provided information on the Maduro government to U.S. authorities. David Rivkin, one of Saab's attorneys, said Saab had not cooperated with American officials and the Venezuelan government were aware of all his activities. The meetings reportedly took place from 2017 until the U.S. money laundering charges were releveled in 2019.
Sanctions
On 25 July 2019, the United States Department of the Treasury imposed sanctions on 10 people and 13 companies (from Colombia, Hong Kong, Mexico, Panama, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the U.S.) in "CLAP", which includes Nicolas Maduro's stepsons and Saab. 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." The Maduro government rejected the sanctions, calling it sign of "desperation" by "the gringo empire." Maduro said "Imperialists, prepare for more defeats, because the CLAP in Venezuela will continue, no one takes the CLAP away from the people." A statement from the Venezuelan foreign ministry "denounces the repeated practice of economic terrorism by the US government against the Venezuelan people, announcing measures whose criminal purpose is to deprive all Venezuelans of their right to food." According to Armando.Info, as a result of US investigations and sanctions, Saab moved his shell companies to Turkey. In July 2021, the United Kingdom issued a series of sanctions that included Saab, which included the freezing of assets and travel bans. 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. Their actions caused more suffering to Venezuelans who were already in poverty for their own private enrichment."
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