Shortly after the Trump administration invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its constitutional President, Nicolás Maduro, it awarded special licenses to a couple of oil trading companies notorious for their corruption: Vitol and Transfigura. On January 29, an analyst from the Swiss organization Public Eye told the Washington Post, “Trump is taking advantage of companies that know how to circumvent regulations.”
Vitol and Transfigura began selling oil that had been held in Venezuelan storage tanks and oil tankers anchored in ports for fear of being seized. Later, the Trump administration issued a series of licenses to also allow other oil companies that used to do business with Venezuela, such as Chevron, Italy’s Eni, Spain’s Repsol, and Shell, to sell oil. This enabled PDVSA, Venezuela’s state oil company, to resume oil transactions, starting with its “traditional” customers, the United States and India, but with an explicit ban on trading with China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba.
In this way, Venezuela went from exporting about 500,000 barrels of oil per day in December 2025 to about 1.25 million bpd by the end of May 2026. It is estimated that between January and May of this year, Venezuela “sold” some 170 million barrels of oil, mainly to the United States and India, and to Europe to a lesser extent. In reality, it was the U.S. government that made the sales, collecting the proceeds and depositing them into a U.S. government account in New York. The Caracas government, hat in hand, then presents a budget and submits it to the State Department for approval. According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the United States “is not stealing” the oil, but rather managing it, and has given the Caracas government enough to pay state employees (bureaucrats, teachers, police, and firefighters).
