Trump threatens to keep Exxon out of Venezuela to avoid investing in the country

BarcelonaUS President Donald Trump said early this morning that he could prevent Exxon Mobil from investing in Venezuela, after the company's CEO, Darren Woods, He described the country as "uninvestable" during a meeting at the White House last week. At Friday's meeting with 18 top executives in the sector to plan the takeover of Venezuela's vast oil reserves following the military operation in which Washington captured Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, Woods said that Venezuela's legal framework would need to change before it could become a viable destination. At that meeting, Trump urged the executives to invest $100 billion to modernize Venezuela's oil industry, an investment that would only pay off in the medium to long term. Woods' skeptical remarks dampen the White House's expectations of securing these resources from the world's largest energy companies. "I didn't like Exxon's response," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on the way back to Washington. "I'll probably be inclined to leave Exxon out. They're playing it too smart," he added. The company has not yet commented.

Expropriated twice

Exxon, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron, the three major U.S. oil companies, had been prominent partners of Venezuela's state-owned oil company PDVSA for decades. But the government of former President Hugo Chávez nationalized the sector between 2004 and 2007. While Chevron negotiated agreements to continue working with PDVSA and has continued extracting oil despite political tensions between the governments of Caracas and Washington, Exxon and ConocoPhillips left the country. According to court rulings, Venezuela currently owes Exxon and ConocoPhillips more than $13 billion in compensation for expropriations. "They've seized our assets twice, and you can imagine that for us to reinvest in them would require very significant changes from what we've seen historically," Woods told Trump on Friday. The executive demanded solid guarantees for investment and a reform of the country's hydrocarbons law. "If we look at the legal and commercial frameworks in place today in Venezuela, the country is uninvestable," he stated. For his part, ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lance explained to Trump that his company is Venezuela's largest non-sovereign creditor and called for a restructuring of the debt and the entire energy system, including PDVSA. Trump assured ConocoPhillips that it would recover a significant portion of the money, but made it clear that the United States wants to start "from scratch." "We're not going to look at what people lost in the past, because it was their fault," he affirmed. The president emphasized that the White House will decide which companies can operate in Venezuela. "They deal directly with us. They don't deal with Venezuela. We don't want them to deal with Venezuela," he warned. On Saturday, Trump signed an executive order to prevent courts and creditors from seizing proceeds from Venezuelan oil sales deposited in places other than the U.S. Treasury.

More prisoner releases

Amid Washington's pressure on Caracas, Venezuela has released 24 prisoners in the last few hours. In addition to these 24 individuals, the Venezuelan human rights organization Foro Penal reports that it is verifying further releases that have occurred in the last few hours.

The release of political prisoners has long been a demand of international organizations. The new government of Delcy Rodríguez He announced that he was agreeing to release some prisoners in what he described as a "unilateral gesture" by the executive branch. to "consolidate peace and peaceful coexistence" in the country. This "gesture" began even before the US aggression against Venezuela. On January 1, two days before Washington's operation to capture Maduro, the Venezuelan government released 80 prisoners, and at the end of December it also released a similar number of people. Regarding this morning's release, among those freed was Alejandro González, a Spanish and Venezuelan national and the ex-husband of human rights lawyer Rocío San Miguel, one of the first prisoners released last week. The Italian Foreign Ministry also reported the release of aid worker Alberto Trentini and businessman Mario Burló, who are in good health and will return home in the coming hours, according to Rome.