Venezuela arrests former Maduro allies in oil corruption probe

Venezuela’s former oil minister Tareck El Aissami, once a powerful confidante of authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro, has been arrested on allegations of corruption, the socialist government has announced.

Former finance minister Simón Zerpa and Sarmark López, a businessman and associate of El Aissami, were also arrested as part of a probe into alleged corruption at state oil major Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), where millions of dollars in government revenue are believed to have gone missing.

Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney-general, said on Tuesday that El Aissami and his co-conspirators were involved in a scheme to directly manage shipments of crude as a way of avoiding US sanctions, without sending the payments through the country’s central bank. Doing so also allowed them to speculate on currency markets, Saab alleged.

Observers see the PDVSA probe as part of a purge of former allies, with tensions being exposed at the top of government. Maduro has
presided over economic collapse in a once-wealthy oil-exporting nation, triggering an exodus of 7.7mn people amid a rise in violent crime.

Francisco Monaldi, a Venezuelan oil expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute, said the timing of the arrest, months ahead of an election and with the future of US sanctions in doubt, could be a message from Maduro to other political and business elites.

“It’s a signal to the [government-friendly] elites, with decisions being taken on elections, that they have to behave or Maduro will crush them as he has done El Assaimi,” he said.

Saab said the three men, once powerful allies of Maduro, face charges of treason, money laundering and misdirection of public funds. They were, Saab said, part of a cabal of more than 50 people plotting to “destroy Venezuela’s economy” from both Venezuela and the US, and that “the way these three subjects behaved is an economic conspiracy”.

El Aissami had not been seen publicly since resigning as oil minister in March 2023. Images released by Venezuela’s communications ministry showed the former minister in handcuffs and being escorted by balaclava-clad police officers.

El Aissami, who used his Syrian and Lebanese parentage to open up business channels to Iran and Turkey while in Maduro’s favour, is also wanted for allegedly facilitating drug trafficking from Venezuela by the US government. Zerpa and López are also under US sanctions.

Before his fall from favour, he was considered an important figure in helping the country evade strict US sanctions.

His prolonged absence from public life since resigning last year triggered rumours that he had been arrested or had fled Venezuela.

Saab said El Assaimi and the others arrested “received dividends from the sale of crude oil and traded these sums of money in different foreign currencies that they converted to crypto assets to mobilise this digital money”, while evading regulatory authorities.

Venezuela boasts the world’s largest oil reserves, though economic mismanagement and corruption have throttled production. Graft investigations inside the country are likely to raise eyebrows, with Transparency International ranking the South American country 177 out of 180 on its corruption perception index.

The arrests come at a sensitive time for Maduro, who is running for re-election in July this year. In order to entice Maduro to permit a “free and fair” election, Washington relaxed strict sanctions on the country’s oil, gas, and mining sectors with the caveat that they would be reimposed on April 18 if political reforms were not taken.

Since then, the government-stacked supreme court has upheld a ban on opposition leader María Corina Machado standing as a candidate, while several of her aides have been arrested, leading the US to threaten to reimpose sanctions.