Venezuela’s gov­ern­ment said Sat­ur­day it de­port­ed a close al­ly of Nicolás Maduro fac­ing sev­er­al crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tions in the U.S. less than three years af­ter the busi­ness­man was par­doned by Pres­i­dent Joe Biden as part of a pris­on­er swap.

The de­ci­sion marks a stark re­ver­sal for Alex Saab, who Maduro fought tooth and nail to bring home af­ter his pre­vi­ous in­ter­na­tion­al ar­rest in 2020. Now, the Colom­bian-born in­sid­er, long de­scribed by U.S. of­fi­cials as Maduro’s “bag man,” may be asked to tes­ti­fy against his for­mer pro­tec­tor, who is await­ing tri­al on drug charges in Man­hat­tan af­ter be­ing cap­tured in a shock raid by the U.S. mil­i­tary in Jan­u­ary.

The Venezue­lan im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ty in a short state­ment Sat­ur­day did not ex­plic­it­ly say where it had sent Saab but said the de­ci­sion was made based on sev­er­al on­go­ing crim­i­nal in­ves­ti­ga­tions in the U.S. The state­ment’s ref­er­ence to Saab on­ly as a “Colom­bian cit­i­zen” ap­peared to be a nod to Venezue­lan law, which pro­hibits the ex­tra­di­tion of its na­tion­als. Fol­low­ing his last ar­rest, Venezuela’s gov­ern­ment sub­mit­ted a copy of what it said was Saab’s Venezue­lan pass­port to a U.S. court, with then Vice Pres­i­dent Del­cy Ro­dríguez — now act­ing Pres­i­dent — claim­ing he was an “in­no­cent Venezue­lan diplo­mat” who had been il­le­gal­ly “kid­napped” while on a hu­man­i­tar­i­an mis­sion to Iran to cir­cum­vent the “im­moral, im­pe­r­i­al block­ade” im­posed by the Unit­ed States.