Alvaro Pulido Vargas, a Colombian businessman accused of laundering more than $2 billion tied to the bribery of Venezuelan officials under Nicolás Maduro, is in U.S. custody and will make his first court appearance Tuesday afternoon in the Southern District of Florida, the Justice Department said Sunday.
"Alvaro Pulido Vargas is no longer a fugitive from justice," said A. Tysen Duva, the assistant attorney general for the department's Criminal Division. Attorney General Todd Blanche announced the arrest on X, writing that Pulido's "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."
The arrest was made by the Homeland Security Task Force, a federal effort whose Miami unit draws agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations. Jason A. Reding Quiñones, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, credited federal law enforcement and unnamed international partners for bringing Pulido to face the charges, but the department did not say where he was taken into custody. UPI reported that the specifics of the arrest had not immediately been made public.
Pulido was already behind bars. Venezuelan authorities arrested him in March 2023 in a sweeping anticorruption case over the plundering of the state oil company, PDVSA, and he was still being held in Venezuela in that case. The Colombian newspaper El Tiempo reported Sunday, citing federal sources, that DEA agents had taken him out of prison there to bring him to Florida. Federal prison records now list him at the Federal Detention Center in Miami.
The newer of the two U.S. cases, an indictment returned in October 2021, centers on CLAP, a Venezuelan government program meant to provide food and medicine to the country's people. Prosecutors allege that from about July 2015 through at least 2020, Pulido and his co-conspirators paid bribes to Venezuelan officials to win CLAP contracts, inflated the contracts' costs to cover the bribes and enrich themselves, and laundered the proceeds through bank accounts in Antigua, the United Arab Emirates, the United States and elsewhere. They allegedly took in about $1.6 billion from the Venezuelan government and moved about $180 million through or into the United States, including accounts in South Florida.
Four others were charged in that case, including Pulido's son and Jose Gregorio Vielma-Mora, a former Venezuelan state governor. Pulido faces five counts there: conspiracy and four counts of money laundering, each punishable by up to 20 years in federal prison.
The older case, brought in July 2019, charges Pulido alongside Alex Saab, a Colombian businessman who served as industry minister under Maduro. Prosecutors say the two won a government contract to build low-income housing in Venezuela, then exploited the country's government-controlled exchange rate by submitting false import papers for goods and materials that never entered the country and bribing officials to approve them. The pair allegedly moved about $350 million out of Venezuela through the United States and into overseas accounts they controlled. He faces eight counts in that case, among them conspiracy.
Saab pleaded guilty in Miami last month to conspiring to launder the proceeds of a bribery and fraud scheme built around CLAP. He admitted organizing bribes and other payments to public officials so that companies secretly controlled by the conspirators could win government contracts to import food and medicine. Maduro himself is jailed in the United States; he and his wife, Cilia Flores, pleaded not guilty to narco-terrorism charges in Manhattan in early January, days after the U.S. military captured them in Venezuela.
The United States had offered a reward of up to $10 million for information leading to Pulido's arrest or conviction. The Justice Department says he had "a prolific history of drug trafficking" before the alleged schemes, including a 1997 conviction in Italy under the name German Enrique Rubio Salas, which prosecutors list as an alias.
The charges are allegations, and Pulido is presumed innocent unless proven guilty. The department's announcement did not identify a lawyer for him.