U.S. and Venezuelan officials have promised a new era of accountability for Venezuela’s lucrative oil industry following the ouster of President Nicolás Maduro.
President Donald Trump said the United States would control sales of Venezuelan oil. Venezuela would send monthly budgets to the White House, the Trump administration said, and the United States said it had hired auditors to check the receipts.
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Venezuela’s new leader and Trump ally Delcy Rodríguez said the public could track every oil dollar on a new website.
None of these initiatives, however, has so far shed light on where Venezuela’s oil money has gone, raising doubts about political will in Washington and Caracas.
Still, even with the best intentions, Washington’s plan to show how and where Venezuela’s oil riches are being spent would be a mammoth task.
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Decades of looting have left Venezuela with an opaque and deeply corrupt oil industry, a problem that Rodríguez largely failed to resolve in his previous role at the helm of the national economy.
For every US$2 Venezuela earned from oil sales earlier this decade, US$1 was diverted, internal documents and official statistics show.
The stakes are even higher today. For Trump, his plan to unlock Venezuela’s enormous oil potential with $100 billion in American investment depends, in part, on convincing industry executives in the United States that his government can establish the rule of law.
For Rodríguez, assuring Venezuelans that the oil industry, a central part of the country’s national identity, benefits the many — not just the few — is essential to improving their slim chances of winning a competitive presidential election that the United States is pushing for next year.
It is unclear how much corruption Rodríguez would tolerate to maintain control of the government, which remains filled with officials linked to Maduro and his corporate backers.
During Maduro’s 13-year rule, Venezuela’s ubiquitous state-owned oil company, known as PDVSA, practically became his family’s personal asset, allowing relatives and allies to sell oil on highly preferential terms.
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This system of favoritism greased the wheels of the governing apparatus, ensuring its loyalty to Maduro, who survived multiple crises before being captured in January by US special forces.
The opaque oil trading schemes continued until Maduro’s fall, and some beneficiaries quietly continued doing business with PDVSA under Rodríguez, according to internal documents and interviews with Venezuelan oil sector officials and people close to the industry.
These questionable negotiations test her promise to break once and for all with Maduro’s economic policies, which she blames for Venezuela’s prolonged financial crisis.
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These documents, previously undisclosed, offer a rare glimpse of the extent of corruption in Maduro’s final years, marked by an economic impasse with the United States and growing internal repression.
The documents and interviews also show the central role played by a Maduro relative, Carlos Malpica Flores, described by several oil officials and industry insiders as the guardian of the Maduro family wealth. The people interviewed for this report spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals.
The Trump administration imposed sanctions on Malpica, 53, in December, alleging that he had “facilitated the continued corruption of the Maduro regime.” Malpica did not respond to questions sent through a business partner and two relatives.
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PDVSA documents show that shell companies controlled by Malpica and other businessmen close to Maduro exported oil worth US$11 billion in 2021 and 2022 without paying anything to the state-owned company. This amount represented half of all Venezuelan oil revenues in those two years, according to statistics from the country’s central bank.
Oil sales outside of official records appear to have violated Venezuelan legislation at the time, which gave PDVSA sole custody of the country’s oil wealth.
Since Maduro’s removal and the imposition of American control over Venezuela’s oil exports in January, Malpica appears to have lost access to crude oil sales, according to people close to the industry.
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But these people, as well as a high-ranking official in the Venezuelan oil sector, claim that Malpica continues to profit from its companies that operate oil fields, provide services to PDVSA and distribute petroleum products on the domestic market.
The Venezuelan government did not respond to requests for comment. The Trump administration declined to comment publicly for this story.
A government official said the Venezuelan government had been providing assurances that resources were being spent correctly.
A senior State Department official, Michael Kozak, told Congress last month that the U.S. government has hired KPMG, a global financial services firm, to audit Venezuela’s oil sales, adding that the company will provide reports at an as-yet-unspecified later date.
Venezuela’s central bank said last week that it had separately hired another auditing firm, without providing further details.
Malpica’s story symbolizes the transformation of the Venezuelan economy into a personal fiefdom of the Maduro family, a system that still remains in part despite the change in leadership.
Malpica’s career took off quickly. Months after taking power, Maduro appointed him to the board of Venezuela’s development bank, known as Bandes. Shortly afterwards, he became national treasurer and chief financial officer of PDVSA.
These positions gave Malpica unfettered access to Venezuela’s oil wealth, which he continued to exploit after leaving the public sector in 2016 and becoming a PDVSA subcontractor and oil buyer.
In late 2022, the PDVSA board met to assess years of unpaid oil bills left by Malpica and other Maduro allies, according to the meeting presentation consulted by the Times.
The council counted almost 240 oil workers who left without payment between 2019 and 2022, causing a loss of US$13 billion to the Venezuelan State.
The council voted, in practice, to write off this amount, the presentation shows.
Months later, Rodríguez took command of PDVSA after articulating the downfall of his predecessor, Tareck El Aissami, a Maduro protégé who is facing corruption charges. Under his management, PDVSA’s most egregious irregularities, such as unpaid oil sales, virtually ceased.
But Malpica and other businesspeople close to Maduro continued to receive preferential access to oil, highlighting the limits of their initiatives.
In 2023, for example, a shell company linked to Malpica became the second largest exporter of crude oil in Venezuela, behind only Chevron, a multinational that has been producing oil in the country for a century, the documents show.
Copies of some contracts show that the shell company, Hangzhou Energy, registered in China, received oil from PDVSA on highly favorable and unusual terms, despite having no history of business activity.
A 2022 contract shows that Hangzhou was allowed to sell about a tenth of the country’s export volumes that year in exchange for providing the government with an unspecified amount of “humanitarian aid.”
It is unclear how much aid Hangzhou actually delivered nor what it included. Created supposedly in response to American sanctions, oil-for-food deals similar to the one reached by Hangzhou became a major source of corruption in Maduro’s final years, draining billions of dollars from the state at a time of humanitarian crisis, according to the United States government and investigations by the Venezuelan website Armando.Info.
An email sent to Hangzhou operations manager Zhang Junling received no response.
Malpica’s close relationship with Maduro and his wife helped him survive the frequent “cleansing” at PDVSA, which saw four of its recent presidents and dozens of executives imprisoned, including most of those who signed contracts with Hangzhou.
Malpica has also managed, over the years, to establish a close relationship with Rodríguez, according to several people who know both men well. This connection seems to have spared him so far from the “cleaning” promoted by the new president, which resulted in the dismissal or isolation of dozens of Maduro’s relatives.
Several oil businessmen close to Maduro have been detained since his capture, but so far none have been formally publicly accused of financial crimes.
The oil industry accountability website, called Transparent Sovereignty, promised by Rodríguez in January, today displays only one record.
The website reports that the government sold US$300 million in fuel oil in March, an amount that was used to increase the minimum wage.
The website does not say who bought the oil or for how much.
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