On 15 September 2026, Alex Saab pleaded guilty before a federal court in Miami to having orchestrated, over nearly a decade, a scheme of bribery and false invoicing that diverted hundreds of millions of dollars from the Local Committee for Supply and Production, the Venezuelan food-box programme known as CLAP. As part of the agreement, he committed to returning 195 million dollars and to handing the American prosecution information on senior officials of the Venezuelan government. The confession adds no new fact to what journalist Daniel Coronell had already documented, with letters, emails and notarised records, a little over two months before Saab’s lawyer, Abelardo de la Espriella, reached the presidency of Colombia. What the confession does provide is the voice of the man himself confirming the exact nature of the company that de la Espriella denied under threat of a lawsuit in 2017, the very one from which, according to those letters, he had already received nearly 375,000 dollars three years before that denial. The man who now governs Colombia knew perfectly well what he was talking about when he insisted, with such conviction, that he knew absolutely nothing.
The 2017 Denial Against the 2014 Documents
In August 2017, Venezuela’s then attorney general, Luisa Ortega Díaz, already in exile and at odds with the chavismo she had served for a decade, named a company called Group Grand Limited at a press conference as the vehicle through which Nicolás Maduro had allegedly diverted funds from the CLAP programme. Ortega had held the post of attorney general since 2007 and had been removed that same year by the Constituent Assembly imposed by Maduro, before fleeing first to Colombia and then to Spain. According to her complaint, the real owners of Group Grand Limited were the Colombian businessman Alex Saab and his partner Álvaro Enrique Pulido Vargas. The accusation came from someone who had defended chavismo from within for years, not from an outside opponent speculating about figures that were not her own.
Abelardo de la Espriella, Saab’s lawyer since 2013, responded immediately to the Barranquilla press. He denied any link between his client and that company, stated that Saab had nothing to do with food businesses, and threatened to sue Ortega for defamation. That same year, in a column published in El Heraldo under the title Death to the Tyrant, de la Espriella suggested that an eventual assassination of Maduro could constitute a patriotic act. The juxtaposition is uncomfortable. The same man who one day imagined in print the tyrant’s violent death was, the next, defending the commercial respectability of the man moving the tyrant’s money.
De la Espriella’s problem is the date. A letter dated the first of May 2014, addressed to Miami tax lawyer Timothy Richards, describes three transfers totalling 374,850 dollars, ordered from accounts belonging to Group Grand Limited and to another Saab company, Consorcio Estructuras Metálicas, at the Global Bank of Commerce in Antigua and Barbuda. A later email, dated 29 April 2015, confirms that two of those payments, of 200,000 and 75,000 dollars, had already gone through. Both documents precede by three years the moment when de la Espriella publicly swore that he knew of no relationship between his client and that company. No corporate lawyer forgets the exact origin of a transfer of nearly a hundred thousand dollars, let alone three transfers carried out within two weeks, channelled from the same tax haven to the same Miami firm.
According to Armando.info, between 2017 and 2018 Group Grand Limited obtained contracts worth more than 600 million dollars to supply 21 million CLAP food combos, and billed as much as 113 million dollars in a single day, on 29 September 2017.
The mechanism was anything but abstract for those who depended on those boxes. Group Grand Limited imported food above the international market price and, according to the complaints Armando.info had documented since 2018, much of that content arrived expired or spoiled in the poorest Venezuelan households, precisely the population the programme claimed to be protecting from the scarcity caused by the country’s economic collapse.
The Money, the Apartment and the Banking Route
The 2014 transfers did not stay in a trust account. Four months after the last transfer, on 2 September 2014, a company called Abeluci LLC, managed by Ana Lucía Pineda Aruachan, de la Espriella’s wife, bought an apartment in Miami’s Bristol Tower, at 2127 Brickell Avenue. The same Timothy Richards who received Saab’s transfers prepared the documents for that purchase.
The deed of sale for the Brickell Avenue apartment officially recorded a price of ten dollars. The documents reviewed by Cuestión Pública show an actual payment of 1,125,000 dollars.
In July 2021, that same apartment was resold for 1.2 million dollars to Luis Carlos Vélez and Siad Char, the latter linked to the mayor of Barranquilla, Alex Char. The full banking route, reconstructed by the Colombian press from the SWIFT messages, ran from the Global Bank of Commerce in Antigua to an intermediary bank in San Francisco, Wells Fargo, before landing in the Richards firm’s account at Bank of America in Miami. Those SWIFT confirmations for those transfers described the operation under the generic label of international tax advisory, a banking formula that concealed on paper exactly what the Venezuelan prosecutor had already denounced publicly months earlier. The United States Department of Justice describes precisely that kind of circuit, shell companies, false invoices and invented shipping documents, as the central mechanism of the scheme to which Saab pleaded guilty.
None of this is illegal on its own, taken fact by fact and stripped of the context surrounding it. A lawyer can charge fees, and a wife can buy an apartment. What proves harder to sustain is that the same man who moved and received that money, through those exact companies, would swear three years later that he knew of no link between them and his client.
A Pattern That Repeats
This is not the first time de la Espriella has minimised a documented closeness, nor the only grey area of his years as Saab’s lawyer. In 2016, according to court documents reviewed by the Colombian press, Saab met in Bogotá with FBI and DEA agents to discuss government contracts, while de la Espriella kept presenting him to the public as a simple housing contractor. On 25 September 2018, an attempt to capture Saab in Colombia failed after an analyst at the Dijín, the Colombian judicial police, tipped him off in advance. Later investigations indicate that de la Espriella’s firm had allegedly warned the businessman’s family. In 2022, court documents revealed that Saab had been cooperating with American authorities since 2018, in open contradiction with the chronology de la Espriella had publicly maintained about when his representation ended.
Miami public broadcaster WLRN reported in June 2026, attributing it to sources close to the case, that it was de la Espriella who had allegedly put Saab in touch with University of Miami professor Bruce Bagley, later sentenced to six months in federal prison for laundering nearly three million dollars tied to that same network. De la Espriella responded that he had met Bagley only once and did not know the nature of his relationship with Saab, an answer that leaves the alleged introduction itself unaddressed. Bagley had built much of his academic reputation writing about Latin American drug trafficking, before ending up convicted of taking part in precisely the kind of operation he had spent his career describing from the safe distance of the lecture hall. The distance between the professor who studied cartels and the professor who laundered for one turned out, in the end, to be shorter than his own writing had ever allowed.
Months earlier, in April 2026, a photograph had circulated of de la Espriella alongside Jorge Luis Hernández Villazón, alias Boliche, a drug trafficker now imprisoned in Tampa. His response then was almost identical to the one he gave in 2017, he had never broken the law, he said, and practising as a criminal defence lawyer does not amount to sharing a client’s crimes. In April 2024, a trusted associate of de la Espriella, Daniel Peñarredonda, was photographed at a chavista event in Venezuela alongside Camila Fabri, Saab’s wife, an episode the presidential campaign never explained. Eleven American Democratic lawmakers, worried about the standing of a hemispheric ally of Washington, had already demanded formal explanations for these ties months before Saab confessed, without getting any answer beyond the generic denial. Each photograph, taken alone, proves nothing beyond a handshake and a room shared for an afternoon. Taken together, across more than a decade and always dismissed with the same practised calm, they describe a career built on proximity to precisely the people a legitimate lawyer is supposed to keep at arm’s length, a habit of association that outlasted every election and every headline meant to end it.
In May 2026, when Coronell published the letter and the emails, he contacted de la Espriella directly to ask whether he had benefited from those transfers. There was no reply. After Saab’s confession on 15 September, no outlet consulted recorded any statement from the presidency on the matter. Silence, more than denial, has become Abelardo de la Espriella’s preferred recourse whenever the documents speak for him.
What Saab’s Confession Confirms for the Current Presidency
Nothing laid out in this text was unknown before Colombia’s 2026 elections. Coronell published it, with documents, less than a month before the runoff. La Silla Vacía, Cuestión Pública, Infobae and RTVC corroborated it in the weeks that followed, each from its own review of the records and bank statements. The Colombian electorate voted with that information already available, and the lawyer of a confessed frontman for Maduro arrived at Casa de Nariño, the seat of the Colombian presidency, with ninety decrees under his arm and a promise to shut down the Special Jurisdiction for Peace.
It is worth recalling that Saab, in a 2021 interview with El Espectador, by which time de la Espriella had already formally stopped representing him, described his former lawyer as a great lawyer and friend, and made clear that their political differences had nothing to do with the practice of his profession. He was not speaking of a stranger. He was speaking of a friend who, according to the documents, was being paid by the same companies that American justice now recognises as instruments of the CLAP plunder.
What Saab’s confession contributes, then, is not a revelation but a judicial confirmation, spoken by the man himself before a Miami judge, that the company de la Espriella denied in 2017 operated exactly as Ortega Díaz had described it eight years earlier. The Colombian president had promised the United States State Department that he would cooperate in pursuing the criminal assets of Saab’s network. More than a week after the confession, that promise still stands without a single public action behind it, no statement, no press conference, no visible judicial order against any of the assets described in this text. That is precisely the difference between governing and litigating, a lawyer can stay silent until the trial ends, a president answers to the public every day, including the days he would rather not.
A man can defend a criminal without being his accomplice. But when that man governs a country and keeps silent precisely at the moment justice confirms what he denied under legal threat, silence stops being a procedural strategy and becomes the continuation, from power, of the same lie…
*G.S.*
Sources
- Maduro Regime Ally Alex Saab Pleads Guilty to Money Laundering Scheme Involving Bribery and Public Contracts for Food and Medicine
- CLAP Boxes incessantly fatten Group Grand Limited Cash Register
- LOS GIROS DE ALEX SAAB
- Saab y De la Espriella, fechas que enredan la desmarcada del candidato
- Entre 2014 y 2015, De la Espriella se benefició de transacciones de Alex Saab
- El apartamento de diez dólares que Abelardo de la Espriella adquirió en Miami tras beneficiarse de los giros de Álex Saab
- Did Colombia’s presidential front-runner help hook up a Colombian criminal and a Miami professor
- "Abelardo de la Espriella es un gran abogado y amigo", Alex Saab
- Saab confiesa, quién responde en Colombia
