US Stands by Oil Deal With Venezuelan Energy Mogul Betancourt
(Bloomberg) — The Trump administration defended its decision to partner with a controversial investor on 17 oil fields in Venezuela, saying he is uniquely positioned to help revitalize the nation’s aging wells and restore the flow of crude.
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Venezuelan entrepreneur Alejandro Betancourt may not be a candidate for sainthood but is a proven operator who can get the job done, a US official said in a briefing with reporters Tuesday. Betancourt doesn’t have any pending legal problems in the US that the government was able to identify, the official added.
The US doesn’t view this deal with Betancourt’s North American Blue Energy Partners as something that will delay a democratic transition by helping Delcy Rodríguez entrench herself in power, the official said, while highlighting the need to bolster oil revenues to respond to the recent earthquakes and build roads, schools and housing in the beleaguered South American country.
Betancourt has been a contentious figure in Venezuela ever since he made a fortune selling power turbines about 16 years ago, during an electricity crisis. He went into the oil industry, and his North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, was pumping about 200,000 barrels of crude a day from fields around Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt before the deal was announced with the US.
His operations flourished under the socialist president Hugo Chavez, and he had a brief falling out with his successor, Nicolas Maduro.
After American forces seized Maduro in a raid on Caracas earlier this year, Betancourt emerged as a key ally of the Trump administration in spite of years of investigations in Europe, the US and Venezuela over allegations of corruption, money laundering and tax fraud. Betancourt has denied any wrongdoing and was never charged with a crime.
The partnership with the US Defense Department is intended to operate fields holding an estimated 65 billion barrels of crude under 100-year concessions. The US State Department has the right to buy 20% of the oil from NABEP for the cost of production, along with an option to buy the remaining 80% at market prices.
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