Oil Execs Seek Reparations from Venezuela – The Tuesday AM Quickie 1/6/26
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THE BIG NEWS
US Oil Execs Seek Reparations from Venezuela
The White House and the State Department are directing oil industry executives to descend on Venezuela ASAP and invest “significant capital” so they can get back the money they lost under the late President Hugo Chavez, Reuters reported. The Trump regime said it will meet with oil executives this week after the US abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro Saturday night and flew him to New York.
Chavez expropriated all oil assets in Venezuela after he took office in 1998, including ones owned by foreign entities. He restructured the state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., commonly referred to as PDVSA, “and prioritized political goals over exports, leading to declining production alongside mismanagement and underinvestment,” Al Jazeera noted. His last expropriations were in 2007. Most US companies left the country and filed for international arbitration, including exploration and production group ConocoPhillips and oil major Exxon Mobil. News agencies reported different amounts those two companies want back; Reuters said about $12 billion and $1.65 billion, respectively, while the Financial Times said $10 billion combined. Chevron was the only US oil major that stuck around and made a deal with Chavez to work with PDVSA.
Oil executives are already seeing gains from Trump’s coup, the FT reported. Stock prices of Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil and Valero Energy all went up yesterday, as did oilfield service providers, including Baker Hughes, Halliburton and SLB. Oil itself went up, too, with Brent crude rising 1 percent to $61.46 a barrel. War profiteers were also big winners yesterday, the WSJ reported. Arms manufacturers around the world saw stock gains thanks to the shift to a “new era” of “hard power,” as CNBC put it, which is a fancy way of saying “violent imperialism.”
As all of that went down in global financial centers, Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, were pleading not guilty to drug trafficking and other charges in New York. Defending him is lawyer Barry Pollack, the NYT reported, who also represented WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. When the hearing came to a close, a man who had been observing the proceeding confronted Maduro forcefully in Spanish. He later told the Associated Press that he had been a prisoner of the Maduro regime. As Maduro followed deputy US marshals out the door, he “looked directly at the man and shot back in Spanish: ‘I am a kidnapped president. I am a prisoner of war.”
And in Venezuela, the supreme court swore in former Maduro deputy Delcy Rodríguez as interim president. After initially voicing anger over Maduro’s illegal abduction and saying that Venezuela would “never again be anyone’s colony,” she then offered to collaborate with the US.