Praia – Cape Verde’s constitutional court has upheld a decision to extradite a Colombian businessman who is close to Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro and accused by Washington of fraud, according to a ruling published on Tuesday.
The decision comes after more than a year of legal wrangling over the case of Colombian Alex Saab.
The 49-year-old, who was first detained in the West African island state in June 2020, is wanted in Miami over allegations he ran a fraud network allowing Venezuela’s rulers to profit from food aid destined for the country.
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In March, the Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) ordered Cape Verde to free Saab.
But the supreme court ruled that Cape Verde had not “signed the protocol granting legitimacy to the Ecowas court”, meaning its decisions do not apply in the country.
Supreme court judges decided to “confirm the legal authorisation for the extradition of the accused to the United States”.
However, Saab appealed that decision to Cape Verde’s Constitutional Court.
According to the ruling published on Tuesday evening, the court’s judges said his suit was meritless.
It is not clear when Saab will be extradited from Cape Verde.
Venezuela’s opposition has described the Colombian national as a “front man” for the populist socialist regime.
Saab was arrested when a plane he was travelling on stopped over in Cape Verde. Two months later his extradition was approved by a lower court.
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Saab and his business partner Alvaro Pulido have been charged in the US with moving around $350 million out of Venezuela either to the United States or through the US to foreign accounts.
If convicted, they face up to 20 years in prison.
Venezuela’s government, which granted Saab nationality and has given him diplomatic status as a special envoy, has called the arrest “arbitrary” and claims he is suffering “mistreatment and torture” at the hands of the Cape Verde authorities.
Roberto Deniz, a Venezuelan journalist who has covered Saab’s story for a long time for the news site Armando.info said that the regime in Caracas was pulling out all the stops to get him released.
“It is clear that there is a lot of fear, not only because he may reveal information about bribes, about the places where money was moved and the inflated pricing,” Deniz said, but also because Saab “was the bridge for many of these deals that the Maduro regime is beginning to carry out with other allied countries”.
Venezuela’s former attorney general Luisa Ortega, who broke with the regime and fled the country, said Saab was “the main figurehead of the regime,” adding that she herself had passed on evidence to “certain authorities”.
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Picture: Getty Images
Source: AFP
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