Alejandro Betancourt was a target of a federal money-laundering investigation tied to over $1 billion embezzled from Venezuela’s state oil company. Then he helped the Trump administration take down Nicolas Maduro. Now the Pentagon owns 35% of his oil company, Switzerland mysteriously dropped its extradition request against him, and a US official says he faces “no active legal problems” at all.
The billionaire who helped broker the Trump administration’s sweeping long-term oil deal with Venezuela was, until recently, a target of U.S. money-laundering investigations involving funds embezzled from the state-owned oil company PDVSA. Now, after assisting U.S. authorities ahead of the capture of Nicolas Maduro, Alejandro Betancourt is Washington’s key partner in an unusual oil agreement with Caracas.
What the Deal Actually Gives Away
The scale of this arrangement is enormous. According to last week’s announcement, the U.S. gains access to about one-fifth of Venezuela’s crude reserves for decades. The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital takes a 35% stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, or NABEP, Betancourt’s own company and a known crude producer in Venezuela. The State Department separately gets the right to buy 20% of NABEP’s oil at cost, plus preferential access to the remaining 80% of output.
In January, Betancourt helped broker a related oil trading agreement that has already led to the export of more than 135 million barrels of crude and fuel to the United States, Europe, India, and the Caribbean, according to vessel monitoring data. This isn’t a hypothetical future arrangement. It’s already moving oil at massive scale, run through the company of a man the U.S. government was investigating for laundering embezzled state funds.
Who Betancourt Is
Betancourt is a prominent member of the so-called “Bolichicos,” a younger generation of Venezuelan business people who amassed fortunes during Hugo Chavez’s administration. His company Derwick Associates won roughly $2 billion in Venezuelan government contracts to build power plants during the country’s electricity crisis in the 2010s, some without competitive bidding, despite having little construction experience. Government data later showed many of those plants operated at a fraction of their intended capacity, or not at all, while Venezuela’s power grid continued suffering widespread blackouts. Betancourt and Derwick have repeatedly denied wrongdoing, saying the facilities were completed and that later failures were the result of mismanagement by state authorities.
That track record is the backdrop against which the U.S. money-laundering investigation unfolded. Before it was paused, six sources told Reuters Betancourt had been identified as an unnamed, unindicted co-conspirator in an alleged scheme by former Venezuelan energy officials and their associates to launder more than $1 billion misappropriated from PDVSA. Ten people have been indicted in that case since 2018. Separately, Spanish authorities opened their own money-laundering investigation into Betancourt last year, involving allegations of $4 billion embezzled from PDVSA, according to Spanish newspaper El País. Reuters could not determine whether that investigation is still active.
A Paused US Investigation and a Stranger Swiss One
Florida prosecutors paused their money-laundering investigation into Betancourt earlier this year, according to eight people familiar with the matter. After that pause, U.S. officials reportedly pressured the Swiss government to ease its own inquiries into Betancourt, according to four separate sources. Switzerland then withdrew its extradition request for Betancourt from the United Kingdom in May, even while insisting its criminal case against him was still proceeding. The Zurich Public Prosecutor’s Office would only say the withdrawal was “because of particular aspects of UK extradition law, which we cannot discuss in detail,” while declining to say whether U.S. pressure played a role.
Mark Pieth, a Swiss legal scholar and anti-corruption expert, called the sequence of events exactly what it looks like: “You would not do that if the case is continuing.” The UK’s Home Office declined to comment entirely.
An anonymous U.S. official told Reuters that most of Betancourt’s legal challenges are “nearly a decade old” and claimed he currently faces “no active legal problems” inside the United States, going on to describe him as the best partner available to boost Venezuela’s oil output. That’s the U.S. government’s own justification for the arrangement: not that the allegations were false, but that they’re old enough, and he’s useful enough, to move past.
What He Reportedly Did to Earn This
Four sources familiar with U.S. policy in Venezuela told Reuters that Betancourt was key to U.S. strategy and planning in the lead-up to the January 3 military operation that removed Maduro from power and flew him to New York to face drug-trafficking charges, which Maduro denies. In the months before that operation, sources say Betancourt supplied actionable intelligence to U.S. and Swiss authorities, alongside his long-standing ties to high-ranking officials from past Venezuelan administrations.
Once he was free to leave the UK, Betancourt traveled to Venezuela in late June and again in July, both times departing from West Palm Beach, Florida, according to flight manifests reviewed by Reuters. His lawyer, Chouraqui, declined to comment on the travel specifically, but defended Betancourt broadly, telling Reuters by email that authorities across multiple jurisdictions have extensively examined the allegations against him and brought no charges.
The Bottom Line
A man who was, by multiple governments’ own accounts, a serious money-laundering target tied to more than a billion dollars in embezzled Venezuelan state funds has turned that same set of connections into a central role in one of the most significant U.S.-Venezuela oil arrangements in decades, one that hands the Pentagon a 35% ownership stake in his own company. Two separate international investigations into him have quietly stalled or reversed course in the exact window this deal came together. The U.S. government’s position isn’t that Betancourt did nothing wrong. It’s that whatever he did, it’s outweighed by what Washington wants from him now.