Venezuela sanctions: OFAC authorized the foreclosure, the resale cost 112 months

There is a house in Southampton, at the eastern end of Long Island. Its owner was on the US sanctions list for providing material support to Petróleos de Venezuela, and he owed a Puerto Rican bank roughly $2.5 million. The bank asked the sanctions office for permission to foreclose, and got it. Its chief executive then separately agreed to sell that same house back to that same owner, for $4 million, through an interposed company. For that there was no permission.

On Monday, in a federal court in Florida, that difference landed inside a 112-month sentence. The man sentenced is Tomás Niembro Concha, 64, a Spanish and Venezuelan national who ran Nodus International Bank until the bank went under. The Justice Department notice sets out two conspiracies in the same file, and they do very different work.

The first is fraud, and it is the one that killed the bank. Between 2017 and 2023, Niembro had Nodus place $11 million with a Miami lender so that the lender could turn around and lend it to him and to board chairman Juan Ramirez; they hid it from the rest of the board, from the executives and from the regulator. Between January 2018 and September 2021 they persuaded the board and the comptroller to buy at least 47 promissory notes, worth some $25.3 million, from Nodus Finance, a Miami company the two of them owned. At least $24.9 million left the bank, and in March 2023 the Puerto Rican regulator told it that it was going into liquidation. The forfeiture that accompanies the sentence exceeds $16.9 million.

The second conspiracy is the sanctions one. It moves far less money and it teaches a good deal more.

Same house, same bank, same sanctioned person. What changes is the verb.

What a permission names, and what it leaves out

A license from the sanctions office does not enable a relationship with someone: it enables one concrete act, described in its own words. Whatever is not described stays prohibited even when the same parties and the same asset are involved. That architecture does not explain well in the abstract, but it reads by itself in the text of the Venezuelan licenses, so we went and counted it.

There are today 21 general licenses in force over Venezuela, and between them they declare 72 exclusions: paragraphs that begin with what the license does not authorize. They are not an appendix. In several they run longer than the part that permits, and in seven of the twenty-one they withhold precisely the step the Puerto Rican bank had to request separately — the step of executing.

The most telling is General License 52C, the one that allows contracting with Petróleos de Venezuela. Its paragraphs (a), (b) and (c) authorize; paragraph (d) excludes, and it runs to six numbered items. The second describes, in the signed text, "the entry into a settlement agreement or the enforcement of any lien, judgment, arbitral award, decree, or other order through execution, garnishment, or other judicial process purporting to transfer or otherwise alter or affect property or interests in property" of a blocked person.

That sentence describes the Long Island act with uncomfortable precision.

It did not govern it. License 52C was issued in 2026, the conduct ran between 2021 and 2023, and the counterparty was not the Venezuelan state company but a person on the list. What repeats is not the applicable rule, it is the design. The permission enumerates what it covers, and in a separate paragraph it describes the adjacent act in full detail in order to leave it out.

The same design shows up across the regime. General License 5Z, the one covering the PDVSA 2020 bond, lets the bond be traded and excludes selling or executing the CITGO Holding shares that secure it without a specific license: a valid collateral that cannot be touched. And four licenses are built entirely on that hinge —49A, 56, 55A and 62—: they authorize negotiating the contract and exclude performing it. License 58 does the same with the sovereign debt, where advising a restructuring is allowed and restructuring is not.

How it resembles an oil contract, and how it does not

Nodus was a small bank and the asset was a house. An operator signing today under General License 50C is in another business, at another scale and with another risk, and three things in this file do not carry over: the internal fraud, which sank the bank and has nothing to do with Venezuela; the presence of a blocked person at the very center of the transaction; and the duration of the scheme, which ran two years with the sanctioned counterparty.

What does carry over is the structure, and there it is identical. A production participation contract signed under 50C lives inside a permission that enumerates acts: paying, exporting, contracting services, moving money through a designated account, signing even when the officer is sanctioned. Each one is described or it is not. The Southampton house puts a price on the zone between a described act and the one that comes immediately after, and until now that zone was argued in seminars.

All through 2026 the conversation about Venezuela has been about what opens: the annex of operators, the gold concession, the weekly memorandums, the distance between extracting and putting up capital. This file is the one that brings a figure from the other side, and the figure is a prison term.

Where the real risk sits from here

The operative question is not whether there is a license. It is which of the seventy-two exclusion paragraphs touches the transaction, and whether the act that is needed is described or merely sits next to one that is. Between those two positions there is no difference of degree: there is the difference that on Monday was measured in months.

And the two lists move together. The sanctions office rewrites these texts often —the latest Venezuelan action dates from September 16— and every reissuance changes at once what is permitted and what is not. Of the two, the second is published just as fully and read a good deal less.