Venezuela: the spoils of the century — who collects for the oil and the gold

"It was a war, but it's perhaps the biggest deal ever made. To the victor belong the spoils." Donald Trump said it on Tuesday from the podium of the General Assembly, and in the hall, among the delegates, sat the person who had signed that agreement from the other side.

Three weeks earlier, from Miraflores, Delcy Rodríguez had said that Venezuela retains ownership and sovereignty over its resources. There is no need to decide which of the two is right. There is a more useful way to read both sentences, and it is to follow the money.

Because money, unlike sentences, leaves a trail. Or should.

What leaves

The United States does not buy Venezuelan crude out of generosity. It needs it. For twenty-one straight weeks it has bought more from Venezuela than from Saudi Arabia — only Canada sells it more — and it cannot replace that with its own, because its own comes out light and its Gulf Coast refineries are built for heavy, sour crude, with no spare plant on which to try anything else. In any ordinary purchase, the one who needs pays the premium. Why it cannot even switch supplier is in the piece on the Gulf Coast refineries.

Here the opposite happened. The agreement, as the White House itself describes it, grants hundred-year concessions over seventeen fields, hands an office of the Department of War 35% of the parent company with a veto over the board, and is governed by U.S. law before U.S. courts. The same fact sheet describes Venezuela's hydrocarbons law as a statute "adopted with U.S. support."

And the money all of that produces does not reach Caracas. Since an executive order in January, whatever is paid for Venezuelan resources goes into accounts held by the U.S. Treasury. The order is careful: it says that money is Venezuela's sovereign property. It also says who decides when it leaves: the Secretary of State.

Between the first figure and the last lies a distance no public paper explains.

What cannot be seen

And not for lack of asking. A congressman wrote in January requesting, among other things, a copy of the agreement. A bill to compel reporting went to committee in March and is still there. The State Department contracted a "transparency mechanism" in April with quarterly reports promised; two quarters in, no report. Three senators asked for the full accounting last week. And on September 18, before Congress, the Treasury Secretary acknowledged that the United States manages not only oil revenue but Venezuelan state assets — gold reserves included — and declined to give the figure, citing an audit under way. The fund's design, with the Afghan and Iraqi precedents, is in the audit of the Oil Fund.

On the Venezuelan side, the government opened a portal to account for the money. In early September it was live, with a methodology and eight defined spending areas. Its revenue and expenditure tables read zero. The US$300 million that had appeared in July was gone.

Eight months, two governments, no figure.

Who can ask

In Caracas, the short answer is nobody with the power to demand one. January's hydrocarbons reform took from the National Assembly the prior approval of oil contracts: it used to be able to debate them and change their terms; now it is notified. What the Assembly voted in September was an "endorsement," by a show of hands, without the contract in front of it. The contract has still not been published.

And whoever signs does so from an office born of a January 3 ruling that the court itself described as an "urgent and preventive precautionary action", with no term and without deciding "the definitive legal qualification of the presidential vacancy." Nobody has qualified it since. Asked about elections, the acting president answered that there will be some when "Venezuela is ready."

There is also a record, and it sits in registers rather than rumour. The same Treasury office that now holds the money kept the signer on its sanctions list from 2018 until April of this year, when it removed her; no document links that decision to the agreement. And a week ago a former minister of the previous government pleaded guilty in Miami and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors, in a case describing bribes shielded by senior officials whom prosecutors do not name.

That record is the strongest argument for not depositing the revenue in Caracas. And it is exactly why it should matter more, not less, that nobody can count it.

The shield

The executive order that created the accounts declares a national emergency, and the threat it names to justify it is that an attachment might reach that money. Not output, not the humanitarian crisis: the creditor. On that basis it voids any judicial process against the funds and specifies that they are not the property "of any private party, including judgment creditors."

Those creditors exist. In Delaware, some fifteen have spent eight years litigating claims of around US$19 billion against Citgo's parent, and there is already a judge-approved bid waiting on the Treasury's signature. The order stops them, and stops them well. The machinery is in the piece on the alter ego doctrine.

A Venezuelan may be grateful for that or not. Keeping the country's revenue away from someone who has spent eight years trying to collect it is, seen from one side, protection. Seen from the other, the clause that stops the creditor is the same one that stops Caracas: the money does not leave without the State Department's signature either. Protecting and withholding are here the same act.

Intent cannot be audited. Accounts can.

When the United States did something similar with Afghan assets in 2022, the fund it created came with a public charter, four named trustees, minutes and a balance anyone can look up. Venezuela's has gone eight months without any of those.

Meanwhile

What the Venezuelan can see is the price of food. Inflation ran at 19.9% in July and 8.9% in August; a family's food basket is up 637% over twelve months. The minimum wage has sat at 130 bolívars since 2022 — income now moves through bonuses, and that minimum measures the decay of the instrument more than what enters a household — but the distance between that number and a basket is now counted in thousands.

Nobody needs the arithmetic to have an opinion. In an AtlasIntel survey for Bloomberg in early September, among nearly two thousand adults, half said the agreement benefits the United States more. One in ten said it benefits Venezuela more.

Three weeks later, in New York, that agreement was being presented as the largest in the buying country's history.

The country that invented the count

This hurts more in Venezuela than in any other producer, and the size of the reserves does not explain why. Venezuela did not arrive late to the argument over who keeps the rent from oil: it opened it. The 1943 law required every concession to revert to the State after forty years; a concession stopped being a sale and became a loan. In 1948, with Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo at the Ministry of Development, a tax reform established that the industry could not earn more than the State. Venezuela went out to explain it to the Middle East, Saudi Arabia adopted it for Aramco, and twelve years later that same minister was founding OPEC in Baghdad with Saudi Arabia's Abdullah Tariki. In 1976 the entire industry passed to the State.

The split that governed half a century of world oil was written in Caracas.

The royalty that 1943 law set was 16.67%. The one Caracas announced in August as the floor of the new agreement is 16%. They are different fiscal systems and do not subtract; but the number chosen as the floor is, eighty-three years later, almost the same. Those laws were debated by a parliament and signed by ministers who could be held to account. This one is authorized by a precautionary office, went through no chamber, and what it pays enters an account whose balance nobody publishes.

Spoils, custody, partnership: everyone will pick their own word, and the president of the buying country has already picked his. For anyone deciding with money, the word matters less than the missing line.

That line is the balance. Publishing it takes an afternoon and it has gone eight months unpublished. While that holds, both readings of the agreement will remain equally defensible.

For the country that taught the world to count its share, that is the most uncomfortable fact of all.