The Trump administration has struck a deal with Delcy Rodríguez, Nicolás Maduro’s former vice president who has proved pliable enough to hold power since the U.S.-backed ouster of her old boss, giving Washington an unprecedented equity position in Venezuelan oil. The vehicle for the deal is North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), a Barbados-headquartered company whose 100-year concession over 17 Venezuelan oilfields, granted by Rodríguez’s government, covers 65 billion barrels of proven reserves. That would make NABEP the second-largest oil company on Earth, with reserves roughly four times the size of ExxonMobil. And it would hand the U.S. government, through a Pentagon equity stake plus preferential purchase rights, effective control over most of its output.
The company’s CEO, Alejandro Betancourt, is not exactly a reassuring choice of partner. CNBC explains:
The U.S. official said the Trump administration partnered with NABEP because its CEO is a “good oil operator” who in “the past has been helpful to the United States government.”
But Betancourt has faced money laundering and corruption allegations. He has not been charged with a crime and has denied wrongdoing. “I’m not nominating anyone for sainthood here,” the U.S. official told reporters when asked about Betancourt’s past.
That’s a remarkable thing for an administration official to say, unprompted, about the man now entrusted with reserves bigger than any major American oil company.
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., called the arrangement “a blatant abuse of power and taxpayer dollars” for turning the U.S. military into an oil investor. Tyler Priest, a University of Iowa oil historian, said partnering with “a shady businessman concessionaire in a country known for endemic corruption” raises “all sorts of red flags.” Even the legal footing looks improvised: days before the deal was announced, the Pentagon told reporters its Office of Strategic Capital didn’t have the authority to take equity stakes in private companies at all. Then the White House confirmed it had done exactly that.
The American right, which has spent decades warning about the dangers of state control over industry, is now led by a president who has engineered a state-owned oil enterprise built on a corruption-tainted middleman and a legal rationale the government can’t consistently explain.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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