Ryan Berg, leader of the Venezuelan Initiative of the Future Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), concludes the portrait with the Observer: creates shell companies to circumvent the architecture of the sanctions imposed on Venezuela“. If so, and he faces a 30-year prison sentence, will Saab negotiate with the court and share what he knows about the Maduro regime?
Alex Saab was born in Barranquilla and started his business in 1995, starting the company to try to expand the towel business of his Lebanese father who settled in Colombia in the 1950s. Second or Country, ended up setting up his own merchandising company for supermarkets and gas stations, which however went bankrupt in 2009. It was there that he met the Venezuelan businessman Alvaro Pulido, with whom he started a number of enterprises associated with Caracas, and became close to the authorities.
In his book, Gerardo Reyes shows how important Saab has become to the regime: “His friends cannot explain how such an ordinary and banal type, with modest aspirations and passions other than love for children, became the financial jackal of the Bolivarian revolution,” writes the journalist Univision … “If Venezuela didn’t have enough milk, we started calling Saab. In the event of a shortage of fuel, he was called to resolve the situation “, illustrated by Reyes in an interview with El País…
It is about his role as a fundamental entrepreneur in creating so-called CLAP boxes (local supply and production committees) that are part of a food distribution program for the poorest. In practice, this social support mechanism has been used in Venezuela as a political weapon, granting access to CLAP to those with a PSUV card (Madauro’s party) and transferring their control to collectives (armed groups close to the regime). “This is an unfair, militarized and discriminatory process in which in practice only those associated with the government party have access to food,” explained by Observer in 2018 Marianella Herrera, Venezuelan physician specializing in nutrition.
According to the US government, CLAP operates through a network of shell companies that buy substandard food in countries such as Mexico, Colombia and Turkey and sell it to the Venezuelan government at inflated prices.… The low quality of food products is evidenced by both the population and the local media – for example, in 2017. ArmandoInfo investigation website analyzed the milk powder available in the cartons and concluded that it was not milk.
And CLAP isn’t Saab’s only problem. The US Treasury also accuses him of having ties to a scheme for the sale of gold by the Venezuelan government to Turkey through shell companies set up by a businessman… The same conclusion is drawn wool brain center Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, which pointed to the creation of a company set up shortly after Maduro’s meeting with the Turkish president, which will transport $ 900 million in gold from Venezuela to Turkey. In return, the country would receive products for its own CLAP boxes.
