While Venezuela had publicly expressed its wish for early engagement with the administration of recently sworn in US President Joe Biden, in an effort to remove the sanctions on its oil industry imposed by former President Donald Trump, the early signs are that Washington intends to keep the sanctions in place at least in the short term.
Recently released figures on the country’s oil exports for February reveal that crude shipments fell to 418,857 barrels a day, volumes that represent a 13% drop in January exports, a likely sign that, for the moment at least, Washington’s efforts to staunch the flow of Venezuelan oil to international markets remains effective.
This, according to a Tuesday World Oil report which reported that the Biden administration now appears to have taken aim at “key trading houses and officials” that had been propping up exports of oil from Caracas,
World Oil said that intelligence provided by Bloomberg in mid-January indicated that Washington had blacklisted the Maltese trading company Elemento Limited and the Geneva-based Swissoil Trading SA for facilitating the Maduro administration’s attempts to circumvent US sanctions.
Setting aside reports that some foreign companies are still prepared to support Venezuela’s efforts to have its oil reach international markets, Caracas is reportedly still relying heavily on ‘rogue’ tankers that turn off their transponders when approaching oil ports in order to avoid detection. The majority of Venezuela’s crude exports have reportedly been going to China, with occasional shipments going to Cuba.
Having only recently openly expressed the hope that the election of Biden to office might create room for possible removal of the sanctions that have all but brought the country’s economy to a halt, the Maduro administration would now appear to be returning to the siege mentality condition that had characterised its behaviour at the height of Trump’s sanctions-related pressure.
