U.S. arrests Colombian fugitive tied to Maduro on laundering charges

Pulido Vargas to appear Tuesday in Southern District of Florida

Federal prosecutors announced Sunday the arrest of Alvaro Pulido Vargas, a 62-year-old Colombian national with ties to jailed former Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, on accusations of participating in multibillion-dollar bribery and money laundering schemes.

Pulido Vargas faces two separate federal indictments, filed in 2021 and 2019, accusing him of participating in schemes to launder proceeds from bribery and fraud involving nearly $2 billion in Venezuelan government contracts. Specifics of the arrest were not immediately made public, and he is expected to make his initial court appearance Tuesday in the Southern District of Florida.

“Alvaro Pulido Vargas is no longer a fugitive from justice,” Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement. “The message to anyone who brings their foreign bribery or money laundering schemes inside our borders: the U.S. Justice Department will pursue these schemes and prosecute those who perpetrate them.”

Pulido Vargas and Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman and former Venezuelan minister with close ties to Maduro, were originally charged in July 2019 with laundering some $350 million connected to a bribery scheme. Prosecutors alleged the pair obtained a contract with the Venezuelan government to construct low-income housing units but instead exploited the country’s government-controlled exchange rate system, submitting false and fraudulent import documents for goods that were never imported and bribing officials to approve them. The money was allegedly laundered through bank accounts in the Southern District of Florida and transferred to overseas accounts the pair controlled, federal prosecutors said.

The 2021 indictment involved the alleged exploitation of Comité Local de Abastecimiento y Producción, known as CLAP, a Venezuelan government-controlled program for the importation and distribution of food and medicine to the country’s poor. Federal prosecutors allege the scheme ran from July 2015 to at least 2020, during which Pulido Vargas and his co-conspirators received some $1.6 billion from the Venezuelan government and laundered proceeds through bank accounts in Antigua, the United States, the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere. The Justice Department alleges Pulido Vargas and his co-conspirators gained the CLAP contracts by paying bribes to Venezuelan officials.

“Alvaro Pulido Vargas is accused of moving vast amounts of illicit money through a corrupt network that exploited the Venezuelan people and abused the U.S. financial system,” Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator Terrance Cole said in a statement.

Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism charges in a Manhattan federal courtroom in early January, days after the U.S. military captured them in Venezuela in a clandestine operation. Saab, described as Maduro’s chief financial intermediary, pleaded guilty last month to conspiracy to launder monetary instruments, after pleading not guilty in July.

Pulido Vargas had been a long-sought fugitive of the United States, which had offered up to $10 million for information leading to his arrest or conviction. He was also under British sanctions.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said in a post online that law enforcement on the HSTaskForce arrested Pulido Vargas, who now faces the two federal indictments. “His alleged actions show a blatant disregard to the Venezuelan people by corrupting government programs intended to provide critical food, medicine and housing for personal enrichment and exploiting the American financial system to do it,” Blanche wrote, adding that no amount of time or distance will stop the Justice Department from working with federal law enforcement and international partners to pursue those involved and bring them to justice in an American courtroom.