Sen. Scott presses for Saab’s return as questions swirl over Venezuela detention
U.S. Sen. Rick Scott is calling for Colombian businessman Alex Saab to be brought back to the United States to face justice, as unconfirmed reports about his alleged detention in Venezuela add a new twist to a long complex legal sagas tied to Caracas’s Socialist regime.
“Three years ago, we had one of the regime’s top thugs, Alex Saab, in U.S. custody, and Joe Biden handed him and Maduro’s narco-nephews back to Venezuela WITHOUT real consequences for the dictatorship,” Scott wrote on X. “With @POTUS and @SecRubio’s leadership, the fate of the Maduro regime is completely different. Now is the time to bring Saab and his cronies back to the U.S. to face justice.”
Scott’s remarks follow multiple news reports that Saab — long considered one of former strongman Nicolás Maduro’s key financial operators — was detained about three weeks ago by Venezuelan authorities for questioning. Venezuelan officials have neither confirmed nor denied the reports and have issued a series of evasive and sometimes contradictory public statements about his whereabouts.
Saab, who has also been referred to as Maduro’s partner and strawman, has notbeen seen in public since the reports began to appear.
Saab spent years as the central defendant in a federal case in Miami accusing him of conspiring to launder about $350 million tied to government contracts. The case was dismissed in December 2023 after President Joe Biden granted him a pardon as part of a prisoner swap with Venezuela. Saab was released from federal custody before trial and returned to Caracas, where he later joined the government.
More than two years later — and weeks after Maduro was captured by U.S. forces in early January on drug trafficking charges filed in New York — Saab could again face federal corruption and money laundering charges in Miami, according to people familiar with the matter.
Colombian network Caracol Televisión reported that Saab was detained by Venezuela’s domestic intelligence service, SEBIN, a claim later echoed by other Colombian outlets and by Reuters, which cited a U.S. official in Washington. Venezuelan authorities, however, have avoided acknowledging any arrest.
National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez said this week he had no information about Saab’s whereabouts. Attorney General Tarek William Saab, who is not related to the businessman, initially dismissed the reports as “fake news” before later saying he had no information about the case.
Since the reports emerged, neither Saab nor his family have made public statements, and his defense attorneys in Miami declined to comment.
The reported detention came weeks after Saab was removed as Venezuela’s industry minister by interim President Delcy Rodríguez following last month’s U.S. military operation that led to Maduro’s capture in Caracas. Colombian media also reported that Venezuelan media magnate Raúl Gorrín was detained alongside Saab for questioning but released hours later.
The circumstances surrounding Saab’s reported detention remain unclear, with analysts questioning whether it signals cooperation between Venezuelan and U.S. authorities or an internal move in Caracas to sideline a politically sensitive figure.
If confirmed, the arrest would mark the latest dramatic turn in a legal and political saga that has stretched for years. U.S. investigators have described Saab, now 54, as a key architect of bribery schemes tied to food, housing and energy contracts, allegedly amassing hundreds of millions of dollars while hiding assets in the U.S. and Europe.
Saab was first arrested in June 2020 in Cabo Verde under an Interpol red notice while his plane refueled en route to Iran. After a lengthy legal battle, he was extradited to the United States in October 2021, where a federal judge ruled that, despite Venezuela’s claims, he did not have diplomatic immunity.
Court filings later revealed that Saab had previously acted as a confidential informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, secretly cooperating for nearly a year beginning in 2016 by recording conversations with co-conspirators and transferring millions of dollars to accounts controlled by the agency before ending his cooperation in 2019.
This story was originally published February 25, 2026 at 10:53 AM.
