US-owned firms appear to help Venezuela avoid US sanctions

MIAMI (AP) — A company with an office in Houston and another owned by two American citizens appear to be helping Venezuela bypass U.S. sanctions and quietly transport millions in petroleum products aboard an Iranian-built tanker, The Associated Press has learned.

The sanctions evasion effort is centered around an idled refinery and adjacent oil terminal on the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao that until 2019 was a major shipping hub for Venezuela's state-owned oil company, PDVSA.

On Sept. 28, the Togo-flagged tanker Colon discharged 600,000 barrels of fuel oil at the Bullenbaai terminal, which is operated by Curacao's state-owned refining company in partnership with a fledgling company, Caribbean Petroleum Refinery, owned by two Venezuelan American dual nationals.

The state-owned company issued a news release celebrating the Colon's arrival as a “historic moment” — saying it was the first delivery for the reactivated terminal, which is capable of storing up to 7 million barrels of oil products.

Although the release made no mention of the fuel oil's origin, the Iranian-built tanker for the past year has shuttled exclusively among ports in Venezuela. Ship tracking data show that two days prior to its arrival in Curacao, the Colon loaded its giant black-and-red hull at the port of Amuay, home to Venezuela's largest refinery.

The little-noticed oil shipment would appear to violate the spirit — if not strictly the law — of U.S. sanctions on Venezuela that have been aimed unsuccessfully since 2019 at forcing President Nicolás Maduro from power.

With Maduro's socialist government shunned as a financial pariah in the west, PDVSA has had to resort to ever-more complex transactions to move oil produced from the OPEC nation's massive petroleum reserves — the world's largest.

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