The US government has said it handled more than $12 billion of Venezuela’s oil revenues in the first nine months of 2026, under a Trump-era arrangement. A report made public by the State Department on November 12 says the account received $12.1 billion from oil, petroleum products and natural gas sales. The funds remain Venezuelan sovereign property.
The arrangement was set up after the ouster of Nicolás Maduro, under a broad energy deal reached with Venezuela’s interim authorities. Venezuelan crude is sold on the open market, and the proceeds go into a US-managed account. The State Department’s report says the account produced $12.26 billion in total, and most of it has been returned to Venezuela under the terms of that deal.
The report says the bulk of the money was disbursed to individuals and businesses in Venezuela through foreign exchange transactions with commercial banks. That channel is the main way the funds reach the local economy, rather than being spent by the government directly.
Some money remains in reserve. As of September 30, the end of the US budget year, $168.6 million was still held in an escrow account managed by the Treasury Department. The report describes the account as a holding arrangement rather than a source of spending.
Legal status is a central point. The report says the funds “remain sovereign property of Venezuela” but are held pending disposition for public, governmental or diplomatic purposes, as decided by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. That gives the Secretary of State discretion over how the money is used, even though it belongs to Venezuela.
The report also names no buyers. It says 20 companies purchased Venezuelan oil and gold in the first nine months of 2026, but their names are redacted. Two companies continued to dominate Venezuela’s crude trade, even as the number of buyers grew.
The figures first emerged in a confidential study by the consultancy KPMG, which the New York Times reported on November 10. The State Department later made its own summary public. The two reports cover the same period and broadly agree on the scale of the revenue.
Rubio has argued that most of Venezuela’s oil revenues were lost to corruption and foreign middlemen before the United States removed Maduro. The New York Times has said its reporting supports some of those claims, although the government’s figures do not show the full picture of the country’s export income.
Independent estimates point to a different scale for the same period. Sintesis Financiera, a Venezuelan consultancy, estimates that the government spent $12.3 billion on foreign currency auctions in the first nine months of 2026. The gap between that figure and the US account shows how much of Venezuela’s revenue flows outside the arrangement.
Trump announced a deal in late August giving the United States access to Venezuela’s oil reserves. The revenue report is one of the first detailed accounts of how that arrangement is operating in practice, and critics have questioned how transparent the process is.
The next signals will be further reporting on the escrow account, the disposition decisions made by Rubio and any independent audit of how the funds are spent. Those steps will show whether the arrangement delivers the public benefits the government describes.
