Were Half of Venezuela’s Oil Revenues Really Stolen? — Part II

Boats in Villa Marina, Falcón State. Credit:Jujovar2010, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia CommonsOpinion by Francisco R. Rodríguez (denver, colorado, usa)Friday, October 23, 2026Inter Press Service DENVER, Colorado, USA, October 23 (IPS) - So, if Venezuela claims to be importing from the rest of the world roughly as much as it was exporting during those years, and the rest of the world confirms Venezuela’s story, then where could those additional $11 billion that presumably ended up in the bank accounts of Maduro’s cronies be? Technically, there are some ways in which a country could spend as much as it earns and still have large sums go missing. The first obvious one is if there were $11 billion lying around to steal. Except we know there weren’t, because the Venezuelan government was broke and had all its international accounts frozen. Even the Central Bank didn’t have access to most of its international reserves at the time. And remember, the Times is telling us that these $11 billion were coming out of unpaid receivables. In other words, the oil was being sold, it was being loaded into ships, and the owners of these ships were promising to pay Venezuela for that oil but, according t...