Spanish prosecutors pursued Alejandro Betancourt, a Venezuelan oil magnate, through a money laundering investigation, while Swiss authorities launched a separate inquiry. Both nations sought his extradition from Britain, where he resides on a sprawling 14-bedroom estate. British authorities apprehended him less than a year ago, imposing travel restrictions.
Yet, these legal challenges proved inconsequential.
As part of the Trump administration’s effort to seize control of Venezuela’s oil sector, the United States is forging an unprecedented partnership with Mr. Betancourt. Under this arrangement, the Pentagon may acquire a significant stake in his enterprise—a transaction that oil analysts say has no parallel in recent American history.
This would position Mr. Betancourt as the primary partner of the Trump administration, which seeks not only to dominate the sale of Venezuelan oil but to directly own a portion of it. Consequently, Mr. Betancourt would sit at the heart of Venezuela’s accelerating descent from a sovereign state into a de facto vassal of the United States.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio advocated for Mr. Betancourt during a spring White House meeting. A source familiar with the U.S. efforts explained that the administration deemed Mr. Betancourt a viable partner due to his extensive experience in negotiating Venezuelan oil deals and boosting production.
Consequently, Mr. Betancourt required unrestricted travel. Officials from the State Department and the Justice Department intervened in the Swiss probe, contacting their Swiss counterparts to dissuade them from pursuing extradition, according to informed sources.
U.S. officials also pressured the British government to relax Mr. Betancourt’s travel restrictions, enabling him to visit Venezuela and the United States to meet with Trump administration representatives. Although initially hesitant, the British government ultimately acceded to the request.
Under the agreement with the Trump administration, a Pentagon financing office intends to partner with Mr. Betancourt’s oil company, North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP). The company is receiving 100-year concessions to operate 17 oil fields across Venezuela.
While Mr. Betancourt does not hold ownership of the fields, the concessions grant him exclusive exploitation rights—rights that represent a monumental opportunity. Collectively, these oil fields hold estimated reserves of 65 billion barrels, nearly matching all proven reserves in the United States.
“The United States has wreaked havoc on us,” declared Rafael Ramírez, a former Venezuelan energy minister. He condemned the unconventional arrangement with Mr. Betancourt as “grotesque” and “unsustainable in the long run,” criticizing the secrecy of the deal with an authoritarian government that many Venezuelans consider illegitimate—a sentiment that resonates across the country’s traditionally polarized political spectrum.
Sara Chouraqui, a spokeswoman for Mr. Betancourt and general counsel for his oil company, dismissed the criticism.
“For Alejandro, this is not a political matter,” Ms. Chouraqui stated. “The fact that he is now positioned to revitalize the country’s long-dormant economic potential is a victory in itself—not for any single political party, but for all of Venezuela.”
This article is based on interviews with oil executives, current and former U.S. officials, and former Venezuelan officials, some of whom requested anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters.
In choosing Mr. Betancourt, the Trump administration bypassed direct partnerships with U.S. oil giants like Chevron, which has maintained extensive operations in Venezuela for decades, or Petroleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company.
The agreement with Mr. Betancourt bears similarities to the transition from state socialism to market capitalism in post-Soviet Russia, when Western nations collaborated with newly minted oligarchs to secure access to Russian oil reserves.
“It’s actually eerily similar,” noted Venezuelan economist Francisco Rodríguez. In both instances, he explained, weak governments ceded critical segments of their oil industries to well-connected figures. In Russia, he observed, these oligarchs amassed immense wealth while frequently bolstering authoritarian rule.
When asked to comment on U.S. efforts to pressure Switzerland and Britain to reduce legal pressure on Mr. Betancourt, the State Department referenced a Tuesday briefing in which a senior official told reporters that the administration had identified “no pending legal problems in the United States.” The official noted that the ongoing legal cases largely stemmed from U.S. prosecutors’ inquiries into Mr. Betancourt’s dealings approximately a decade ago.
The White House declined to comment, and neither the Justice Department nor the British Embassy in Washington responded to requests for comment. The Washington Post previously reported details of U.S. efforts to assist Mr. Betancourt with his legal challenges.
Explaining the deal, Mr. Rubio told a Venezuelan journalist this week that the partnership with Mr. Betancourt would be “professionalized” and would “operate under laws that will apply to it so that the money is never used improperly.”
President Trump has championed the deal as a mechanism to lower gasoline prices and replenish U.S. strategic oil reserves, though the endeavor could take years and questions remain regarding whether the Pentagon possesses the legal authority to execute it.
Mr. Betancourt has a protracted history of navigating the shadowy realm of secretive oil deals, regime power struggles, and multiple financial crime investigations.
However, until the deal surfaced recently, Mr. Betancourt, 46, who was born into an elite family tracing its lineage to a 19th-century Venezuelan president, was primarily known for his adeptness at securing deals with Venezuela’s authoritarian leaders, a skill he honed in his twenties.
Profiting handsomely from no-bid contracts with the Venezuelan government, he funneled that wealth into trophy real estate globally, including a penthouse in Manhattan’s Olympic Tower and a Spanish castle with vast hunting grounds, as he diversified into new ventures ranging from African banking to Venezuelan oil extraction.
Despite the unorthodox nature of the agreement with the Trump administration, Venezuelan oil experts argue there is sound reasoning behind this new approach.
Franco Sampieri, director of the Petroleum Chamber of Zulia, an oil-producing state in western Venezuela, stated he believed the deal would generate numerous direct and indirect jobs for the region.
“We are 30 years behind,” Mr. Sampieri asserted, stressing that Zulia desperately required such an initiative to resuscitate the industry.
Petróleos de Venezuela is a hollowed-out remnant of its former self, crippled by mismanagement and corruption, which diminishes its appeal as a potential partner. Mr. Betancourt also possesses a reputation—however marred by allegations of impropriety—for getting business done and increasing oil production in Venezuela.
The Trump administration may also wield a degree of leverage over Mr. Betancourt that it could not exert over a major U.S. oil company, particularly following his arrest in Britain last November in connection with international money laundering inquiries.
If Mr. Betancourt does not comply, the Trump administration could reverse course and pressure foreign legal authorities to revisit allegations, or compel the Justice Department to reactivate its investigation into a U.S. money laundering case in Miami. In that case, Mr. Betancourt was identified, though not by name, as an unindicted co-conspirator, according to a person familiar with the matter.
The assistance Mr. Betancourt has received from the U.S. government to evade further scrutiny—rather than being treated as a potential witness in other corruption inquiries or even as an unindicted co-conspirator—has shocked former Justice Department officials, the person familiar with the Miami investigation said.
Mr. Betancourt has recently forged a close relationship with Mauricio Claver-Carone, a powerful political operator close to Mr. Rubio, according to two people with knowledge of their relationship. Mr. Claver-Carone has been instrumental in shaping Venezuela policy despite holding no formal role in the Trump administration.
Mr. Betancourt hails from a privileged background. His father was a cardiologist and pianist, and his mother a jewelry designer. He attended an elite private high school in Caracas before studying business at Boston’s Suffolk University.
When he returned to Venezuela, high oil prices were triggering an economic boom. Hugo Chávez’s revolution was in full swing as the Venezuelan leader sought to utilize oil revenues to consolidate power, fund antipoverty projects, and elevate Venezuela’s global profile.
However, amid Mr. Chávez’s expropriations and anti-American rhetoric, there were also opportunities to amass a great deal of money quickly. Mr. Betancourt cut his teeth selling turbines, a venture that allowed him to cultivate ties with government officials.
Leveraging those contacts, Mr. Betancourt entered the power plant construction business during a period of severe electricity shortages in Venezuela. Despite his lack of experience in the power generation sector, Mr. Chávez’s government awarded him a series of no-bid contracts.
José Aguilar, an independent Venezuelan energy auditor who frequently coordinated with Venezuelan civic transparency organizations, discovered that Mr. Betancourt’s company overbilled state entities by more than $800 million for the power plants, often by adding massive markup fees.
Separately, prosecutors in Europe and the United States investigated claims that executives at Mr. Betancourt’s company paid tens of millions of dollars in bribes to secure the contracts.
Mr. Betancourt was not charged as a result of the multiple investigations into these activities, and Ms. Chouraqui, his spokeswoman, stated he had never been charged with a crime in any jurisdiction.
Even so, Mr. Aguilar called the U.S. government’s decision to partner with Mr. Betancourt “shameful.”
All of Mr. Betancourt’s early deals laid the foundation for rapid wealth accumulation. However, they also exposed him to scorn from many Venezuelans who viewed him as a traitor for dealing with a government that was jailing dissidents, purging critics from the civil service, and nationalizing segments of the economy.
Mr. Betancourt entered Venezuela’s oil industry in 2011 by acquiring a minority stake in Petrozamora, a state-controlled producer operating oil fields in Lake Maracaibo.
Coordinating with other minority owners from Russia, Mr. Betancourt maintained his stake in Petrozamora until 2022, when a periodic purge by the Venezuelan government forced him out of the company at the behest of Tareck El Aissami, the then-oil minister and rival of Delcy Rodríguez, the then-vice president.
However, Mr. El Aissami’s purge was short-lived and served as the catalyst for his own arrest in 2024 on corruption charges.
After his stake in Petrozamora was expropriated, Mr. Betancourt navigated the fallout by aligning with the regime faction led by Ms. Rodríguez, who is now Venezuela’s president, and her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the head of the National Assembly.
He regained his stake in Petrozamora in 2024 through NABEP, a newly created company registered in Barbados. The company facilitated a rapid operational turnaround, increasing production from 20,000 barrels a day to approximately 200,000.
In doing so, NABEP emerged as the second-largest private oil company in Venezuela, coming close to Chevron’s production of approximately 280,000 barrels a day.
As the Trump administration attempts to ramp up Venezuela’s overall oil output, this positioned Mr. Betancourt not only as a key interlocutor between Washington and Caracas, but as an individual poised to amass even greater wealth and power as a partner of the U.S. government.
Isayen Herrera contributed reporting.
