The US Department of Justice said Álvaro Pulido was arrested during a Homeland Security Task Force operation on Sunday, but provided no further details on how he came to be in US custody. Pulido had been held in a Venezuelan jail since March 2023 on accusations of diverting profits from the state-run oil company PDVSA.
Pulido was the subject of a $10m (£7.5m) reward offered by the US Drug Enforcement Administration and the State Department for information leading to his arrest.
His detention comes two months after Alex Saab, another Colombian businessman with close ties to the Venezuelan government, pleaded guilty to money laundering charges in a US court.
The US Attorney's Office said Pulido had been charged in two separate federal indictments involving the alleged laundering of more than $2bn (£1.5bn) in connection with Venezuelan government bribery schemes.
US prosecutors say Pulido, along with four co-defendants, bribed Venezuelan government officials to secure contracts to provide poor Venezuelans with food and medicine. They accuse him of wildly overcharging the Venezuelan government and laundering the profits through bank accounts abroad, including in the US. They also allege he worked with Alex Saab to launder $350m from a separate bribery scheme involving Venezuela's currency exchange system.