Colombian businessman appears in a Miami court as he faces charges he laundered money for the Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's regime

• Alex Saab appeared in a Miami court on Monday following his extradition from Cape Verde on Saturday
• The 49-year-old Colombian native is facing accusations over laundering  money for the Venezuelan regime of President Nicolás Maduro
• Saab is expected to return to court on November 1, when he will  have the chance to enter a plea before magistrate Judge John O´Sullivan
• The extradition of Saab to the United States forced President Maduro to cancel meetings with opposition leaders in Mexico  
• His wife Camila Fabri, took part in a rally on Sunday in Caracas, Venezuela, and read a letter that he penned in which he said he will not 'lie to favor the U.S.' 

A businessman who is accused by the United States government of laundering money for Venezuelan's socialist regime of President Nicolás Maduro appeared for the first time in court Monday, two days after he was extradited from Cape Verde to Miami.

Dressed in orange prisoner's garb, Alex Saab shook his legs nervously in front of a camera awaiting his Zoom court hearing as more than 350 journalists, gawking opponents of Maduro and members of Saab's family were in attendance.

The 49-year-old Colombian businessman raised his bushy eyebrows but was largely silent as magistrate Judge John O´Sullivan, through an interpreter, informed him that he was being charged with eight counts of money laundering.  

Saab's next court appearance has been set for November 1 when he will have the opportunity to enter a plea. 

Saab's extradition to the U.S. from Cape Verde, where he was arrested 16 months ago, has already ricocheted far and wide.

Maduro's government suspended negotiations with Venezuela's U.S.-backed opposition after Saab had boarded a Department of Justice aircraft on Saturday. Saab's extradition also saw six American oil executives it accused by the Venezuelan government of corruption headed back to prison. 

Gustavo Cárdenas, Jorge Toledo, Tomeu Vadell, Jose Luis Zambrano, Alirio Jose Zambrano and Jose Angel Pereira - who all worked for Citgo - had been under house arrest in another politically charged case marked by allegations of wrongful detention.

The Maduro government has labelled Saab a diplomatic envoy and has spared no effort to free him after he arrested on a U.S. warrant in the African archipelago while making a fuel stop en route to Iran in June 2020.

On Monday, it was joined by ally Russia, whose ambassador in Caracas tweeted his 'most energetic and categorical protest against the kidnapping' of Saab.

Saab along with Alvaro Pulido, 44, also a Colombian national, was indicted by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida on July 25, 2019, for reportedly paying off Venezuelan officials and drawing fake import papers to enrich themselves with more that $350 million from a low-income housing project they obtained from the government of Venezuela in November 2011.

Saab and Pulido took the money out of Venezuela through the United States before funneling their illicit proceeds into offshore bank accounts.

The eight-count indictment includes one count of conspiring to to launder money and seven counts laundering money.   

Following the indictment, Saab was was sanctioned by the Trump administration for allegedly utilizing a network of shell companies spanning the globe - Turkey, Hong Kong, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates - to hide windfall profits from overvalued food contracts.

But Saab's connections extend much deeper.

Among those the U.S. claims he paid to win government contracts are Maduro's stepsons. Commonly known in Venezuela as 'Los Chamos,' slang for 'the kids,' the three adult children of first lady Cilia Flores from a previous relationship have themselves been under investigation by prosecutors in Miami for several years, two people familiar with the U.S. investigation told The Associated Press.

Michael Penfold, a Venezuelan political analyst, said that Saab's extradition is likely to freeze all attempts to bridge deep distrust between the Maduro government and its opponents. 

The two sides have been meeting since August in a bid to jointly address the country's ongoing humanitarian crisis, which has led more than 5 million people to flee the country in recent years, and pave the way for a democratic opening starting with next month's regional elections. 

The Biden administration, which has tried to downplay the political impact of Saab's extradition, is key to the success of those talks. After years of cracking down on its opponents, Venezuela's cash-starved government is considering granting more freedoms in exchange for the U.S. reversing crippling sanctions put in place on one of the world's largest oil producers by the Trump administration, which was hellbent on ousting Maduro.

'Saab's extradition restarts the bad blood between Venezuela and the U.S.,' said Penfold, a global fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington. 'We're going back to the old dynamic of mutual recrimination that the negotiations had started to ease, but with the difference that now these indictments are part of that dynamic.'

Norway, which is sponsoring the fledgling talks, urged restraint after Maduro's government said it would not travel to Mexico City for the next round of talks, which were scheduled to take place this week.

'We will keep working for the parties to, as soon as possible, continue their important effort at the negotiating table for an inclusive political solution for the benefit of the Venezuelan people,' Norway's foreign ministry said in a statement

In Caracas' historic Plaza Bolivar, Saab's wife, a former Italian model, led a small rally Sunday of a few dozen government supporters protesting what they see as Saab's 'kidnapping.'

'I don't plan to lie to favor the U.S.,' said a nervous-sounding Camilla Fabri, reading a letter she said was penned by her husband. 'I've not committed any crime, in the U.S. or in any country.'

Hours later, Maduro himself entered the fray, saying the U.S. - not his government - delivered a 'mortal blow' to the dialogue effort and next month's gubernatorial elections, which pits a bitterly divided opposition against a slate of pro-Maduro candidates supported by the central government.

He also asserted, with no evidence, that interrogators in Cape Verde used electric shocks to torture Saab and extract a false confession that in the end never came.

'They wanted to force him into becoming a monster, a false accuser against Venezuela, against me and against the Bolivarian revolution - something he never allowed,' Maduro said on state TV.

The out-of-court maneuvers have been especially troubling to the families of nine Americans jailed in Caracas. Over the weekend, they published an open letter appealing to the White House to remain engaged on Venezuela.

'Mr. President, we are frustrated by the lack of action by your administration,' the families said in the letter, which was written just prior to Saab's extradition. 'The people in charge of protecting and returning wrongfully detained Americans have not even taken the basic first step of directly engaging with the Venezuelans that are holding our loved ones.'

Those jailed include six oil executives who had been working for the Houston subsidiary of Venezuela's state-owned oil giant PDVSA who were convicted and sentenced last year to long prison sentences for embezzling funds from a never-executed plan to refinance Citgo's bonds. The families of the so-called Citgo 6 and the U.S. government have vehemently rejected the accusations and consider the men wrongfully detained.

Within hours of Saab's extradition, security forces returned the oil executives to the infamous Helicoide jail where they've been held on and off since being lured to Caracas in 2017 for a meeting at which they were arrested by masked police who stormed a conference room where they were gathered. 

Also at the prison is former U.S. Marine Matthew Heath, who is awaiting trial on weapons charges tied to a supposed plan to sabotage refineries, and two former Green Berets that Caracas has tied to a failed cross-border raid from Colombia to overthrow Maduro.

Colombian President Ivan Duque on Saturday praised Saab's extradition, calling it a 'triumph in the fight against the drug trafficking, asset laundering and corruption' that he says have blossomed under Maduro's government. 

Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who is recognized as the country's acting president by the United States and more than 50 other countries, also welcomed the move.

'We Venezuelans, who have seen justice kidnapped for years, respect and celebrate the system of justice in democratic countries like Cape Verde,' he tweeted.