MIAMI (AP) – A West African regional court has ordered the immediate release of a Venezuelan businessman close to President Nicolás Maduro, finding his arrest in Cape Verde illegal under US money laundering charges.
In a ruling on Monday, a court belonging to the Economic Community of West African States, or ECOWAS, also ordered Cape Verde to suspend all extradition proceedings against Alex Saab and compensate him $ 200,000 in damages.
It is not clear what effect the verdict of the three-judge panel will have on the extradition proceedings against Saab, if any. Cape Verde, who arrested the Colombian-born businessman in June when his plane stopped on a flight to Iran, had previously rejected the jurisdiction of the court in Nigeria. And an appeals court in the country on the island has already eased his extradition, although the country’s supreme court has yet to sign.
But that comes when Saab’s U.S. attorneys were in a federal court in Miami on Monday, claiming that their client was exempt from prosecution because of the many diplomatic posts he has held for Maduro’s government since 2018.
U.S. officials believe Saab has many secrets about how Maduro, his family and top assistants allegedly took millions of dollars in government contracts amid the famine in the oil-rich country. At the time of his arrest, he allegedly traveled to Tehran to negotiate agreements to exchange Venezuelan gold for Iranian gasoline.
In its ruling, the ECOWAS court rejected Saab’s allegations that he enjoys immunity from prosecution as a special envoy of Maduro’s government, the biggest argument of his American lawyer. It also noted that Saab was not on the passenger list of the San Marino-registered aircraft when it stopped in Cape Verde, preferring to transport its mission between two US-approved countries.
Instead, it blamed Cape Verde for allegedly not having an Interpol-issued Red Alert when it arrested Saab, saying its jail time also violated the country’s laws against arbitrary detention.
Saab’s lawyer in New York, David Rivkin of Baker & Hostetler, argued in federal court on Monday that the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations offers his client diplomatic immunity, even while in transit.
“The government’s stance amounts to a claim that any diplomat in the world is not entitled to immunity unless the State Department accepts its diplomatic status,” Rivkin said.
But federal prosecutors have argued that the Vienna Convention only regulates permanent diplomatic missions, not temporary assignments like Saab’s meetings in Iran. They also note that the alleged misconduct by Saab took place before Venezuela granted him diplomatic status in 2018, first as a special envoy for humanitarian aid and last year, after his arrest, as a representative of the Ethiopia-based African Union.
“Any diplomatic status he may have in Iran, the African Union, or anywhere else will not protect him from responsibility for his conduct in the United States,” said Alex Kramer, a Justice Department lawyer.
Rivkin vehemently rejected the claim, arguing that numerous letters between Maduro and Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei were sufficient proof that he was dealing with official government affairs.
“The point of diplomatic immunity is that you have it while you have it,” he said.
Federal prosecutors in Miami charged Saab in 2019 with money laundering charges related to a suspected bribery scheme that pocketed more than $ 350 million from a low-income housing project for the Venezuelan government that was never built.
The Trump administration made Saab’s extradition a top priority, and at one point even sent a warship from the navy to the African archipelago to watch the prisoner.
In turn, Maduro’s government vehemently objected to the prosecution of Saab as a covert attempt at change of government by the US government, and ordered him to resist extradition at all costs. His continued detention is likely to hamper Maduro’s efforts to restart Biden’s government, as well as the continued imprisonment of several Americans in Caracas, including six Venezuelan U.S. oil executives and two former Green Berets trapped in a failed raid in search of Maduro.
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