Alex Saab due in Miami Tuesday to plead guilty on food-contract count

Alex Saab is listed for a change-of-plea hearing on Tuesday before Judge Kathleen Williams in Miami federal court. Court records do not yet publish the terms. His lawyer, Neil Schuster, declined to comment. Saab, 54, is a Colombian-born businessman who served as Venezuela's industry minister and stood beside Nicolas Maduro in official photographs, including a 23 January 2024 event in Caracas.

The charge now in front of Williams is a single count of money laundering. Prosecutors say Saab used shell companies, false shipping papers and skimmed government contracts to import food from Colombia and Mexico while Venezuelans queued for staples. The Miami U.S. Attorney's Office has described the scheme as theft from a welfare plan meant to buy food, with some proceeds moved through U.S. bank accounts. He pleaded not guilty on 24 July after his lawyers entered the plea for him.

The first Trump administration charged him in 2019. He was arrested in 2020 during a refuelling stop in Cape Verde on a flight that Caracas called a humanitarian mission to Iran. Cape Verde held him through extradition fights. In 2023 President Joe Biden pardoned him as part of a swap that freed several Americans held in Venezuela. Saab went home. In January 2026 U.S. forces captured Maduro in Caracas. Maduro has pleaded not guilty to drug trafficking and is due for trial on 1 June 2027. In May, acting President Delcy Rodriguez deported Saab under U.S. pressure. She called the deportation a matter of national interest.

A guilty plea on Tuesday would close a case that has already been opened, traded away and opened again. It would also give prosecutors a cooperating witness, if the agreement requires testimony, in the wider Maduro docket. It would not by itself decide Maduro's trial. It would decide Saab's exposure on the food contracts and would put a number, still unpublished, on prison time and forfeiture.

Rodriguez's government sent him out after using him as proof that Washington bargains. Biden's pardon is now an exhibit in the opposite argument: that swaps can be reversed when the other party loses power. Tuesday's hearing is short. The history attached to it is not. If Saab admits the count, the record will show a man charged under Trump, freed under Biden, returned under Rodriguez, and sentenced under a second Trump term. That sequence is the story prosecutors will read into the minute order. The plea paper will read narrower: one count, one name, one court in Miami.