Alvaro Pulido, a businessman long sought by the United States over allegations that he paid bribes to senior Venezuelan officials in return for state contracts, has been taken into American custody.
US officials confirmed the detention on Sunday. They said it followed an investigation carried out by the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations.
Pulido, 62, was indicted in a Miami federal court in 2019 and again in 2021. The indictments formed part of an inquiry into Alex Saab, his business partner over many years and a one-time ally of Nicolás Maduro, the ousted Venezuelan president.
The DEA and the state department had been offering a reward of up to $10m for information leading to his arrest.
It remained unclear on Sunday how Pulido came to be in US custody. He is scheduled to make his first court appearance in Miami on Tuesday.
In a social media post on Sunday, the US attorney general, Todd Blanche, said Pulido’s alleged conduct showed “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 added that neither time nor distance would stop the justice department “from working with our federal law enforcement and international partners to pursue these criminals and bring them to justice in an American courtroom”.
Venezuelan authorities have so far said nothing about the arrest. The silence reflects the difficulty facing Delcy Rodríguez, the country’s acting president, as she tries to appease sections of the ruling coalition that want her to resist efforts by the Trump administration to round up scores of Venezuelan insiders wanted by the US, sometimes for years, over serious crimes ranging from corruption to drug trafficking.
Pulido, who was born in Colombia, was arrested in Venezuela in 2023 as part of a sprawling crackdown on corruption inside the state-run oil company PDVSA. That operation was led by Rodríguez while she was serving as Maduro’s vice-president. She took over as Venezuela’s acting president after the US military’s ouster of Maduro in January.
Prosecutors allege that Pulido and Saab created a network of offshore shell companies to funnel bribes to top allies of Maduro in exchange for more than $2bn in contracts to import food, medicine and low-cost housing at a time of widespread hardship in the South American country.
The US attorney’s office for the southern district of Florida said in a statement that Pulido had a prolific history of drug trafficking before the alleged offenses, including a 1997 conviction in Italy under the alias German Enrique Rubio.
Saab, who also hails from Colombia, was deported to the US by Rodríguez in May. In September he pleaded guilty in a related bribery case, agreeing to cooperate against Maduro and other individuals and to forfeit $195m in criminal proceeds from the corruption scheme.
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