Donald Trump has long coveted the oilfields of other nations and declared an agreement with Venezuela to be “the biggest oil deal in world history”. But the deal, reached after the US seized Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, is almost certainly doomed to collapse amid a wide array of legal and logistical issues, a Guardian investigation has found. The US president first mused about taking oil from Iran in 1987, when he told ABC’s Barbara Walters that Iranian attacks on American shipping during the Iran-Iraq war required an extreme response.
Over the ensuing years, he has returned frequently to the idea that America should seize oil from other countries after military conflict, from Libya to Iraq. Earlier this year, Trump finally got a chance to enact his plan – at gunpoint. US forces stormed Venezuela in January and seized Maduro, who was quickly shuttled to a federal holding facility in the US and replaced by the compliant Delcy Rodríguez.
Trump told the Atlantic in the days following the raid that “if [Rodríguez] doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” Then in August, Trump announced that the office of strategic capital at the Pentagon, which he has rapidly transformed, would own a third of the second-biggest private Venezuelan oil firm, North American Blue Energy Partners (Nabep). Trump said the deal means he’ll soon refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which dropped to a longtime low after the US invaded Iran. But virtually everything Trump and his cabinet have said about the deal is false and misleading, according to the experts and officials who spoke with the Guardian.
The Venezuelan law governing oil development does not allow for 100-year deals, or anything over 25 years. The office of strategic capital isn’t authorized in US law, experts say, to own shares in companies. Moreover, they say, the deal as structured won’t bring new capital to Venezuela’s oil sector.
And contrary to Trump’s claims, the Venezuelan oil will not help refill the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve any time in the near future. There is also a curious figure at the center of the deal: Alejandro Betancourt López, the affable Venezuelan with a complex background who is becoming a partner of the US government as the owner of Nabep. Betancourt, 46, went to college in Massachusetts and has homes in Spain, the UK and New York City.
He has a history in Venezuela’s energy and oil sector, owns a sunglasses company, and once had Rudy Giuliani as his lawyer. Betancourt, who has been drawn into multiple international investigations in connection with Venezuelan corruption allegations, was brought into the deal by a private associate of Marco Rubio, according to three people who know him. Betancourt has never been charged with or convicted of any crime.
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