Former Venezuelan industry minister Alex Saab, a close ally of former president Nicolas Maduro, was expelled to the United States for a second time, Venezuelan officials have 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 on Saturday.
A Colombia-born businessman, Saab had become close to Venezuela’s government in the final years of 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.
