US Handled More Than $12 Billion of Venezuela’s Oil Revenues in Nine Months, State Department Report Shows

The United States handled more than $12 billion of Venezuela’s oil and mineral revenues in the first nine months of 2026, according to a report made public by the State Department on Thursday, November 12. The report, prepared by the accounting firm KPMG, sets out how money paid by buyers of Venezuelan oil and other natural resources flowed into a United States Treasury account, and how nearly all of it was then released to the interim government in Caracas. The arrangement was established after President Donald Trump’s administration seized then-President Nicolas Maduro in January, and it has put Washington in the unusual position of collecting, holding and disbursing the export earnings of another country. The disclosure is the first detailed public accounting of a system that has drawn scrutiny from lawmakers, from critics who call it an extraordinary exercise of American power, and from supporters who say it is a transparent way of keeping Venezuela’s oil wealth out of the wrong hands. This is the story of the US Venezuela oil revenues 12 billion report November 2026, what the report shows, how the money moved, and what it still does not explain.

1. What the Report Says

The report is 53 pages long, and it covers the period from January 3, 2026 to September 30, 2026 — the first nine months of the arrangement. It was dated October 29 and transmitted to Congress in early November, and the State Department made it public on Thursday, November 12. Details of the report were first reported by the New York Times on Tuesday, two days before the public release. The State Department said the disclosure was part of an effort to promote transparency and accountability in the management of the funds, and an official speaking anonymously told reporters that the report shows the process is working.

What the report describes is, in outline, straightforward. Buyers of Venezuelan oil and other natural resources deposited their payments into accounts controlled by the United States. The money was then released to the interim government in Caracas, which is led by former allies of Maduro and works closely with Washington. The report presents this as a custodial arrangement: the funds, it says, remain the sovereign property of Venezuela, held pending disposition for public, governmental or diplomatic purposes as determined by the United States Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. That single sentence is the legal heart of the whole system, and it is also the sentence that critics focus on, because it places the decision about when and how Venezuela’s own money is released in the hands of an American official.

1.1 The $12.26 Billion Total

The headline figure in the report is $12.26 billion. That is the amount the United States took in from verified and approved entities engaging in authorised activities in Venezuela between January 3 and September 30, 2026. The figure is larger than the rounded $12 billion used in most headlines, and the difference matters: the extra $260 million is itself a large sum, roughly equal to the entire annual budget of a small country. The report says that more than $12 billion of that revenue had been disbursed by September 30, with about $169 million remaining in the account at the end of the period.

The scale of the figure is striking when set against Venezuela’s economy. Oil has long been the country’s main source of foreign currency, and the money flowing through the American-controlled account represents the bulk of the country’s export earnings for the year. For nine months, in other words, almost every dollar Venezuela earned from selling its resources abroad passed through Washington first. That is the fact that makes this report more than an accounting exercise. It is a measure of how completely the United States has inserted itself into the financial life of another country, and it is why the details of how the money was handled matter far beyond the numbers themselves.

It is also worth noting what the total does not include. The report covers only the period from January 3 to September 30, and only the funds that passed through the American-controlled accounts. It does not cover the final three months of the year, and it does not cover any Venezuelan oil or mineral sales that took place outside the authorised system. The $12.26 billion is therefore a partial picture by design — a nine-month window into an arrangement that is still operating, and whose full-year total will be larger.

1.2 Where the Money Came From

Almost all of the money came from oil. The report says that more than $12.1 billion of the total — about 99 percent — came from the sale of oil, other petroleum-based products and natural gas. That is consistent with Venezuela’s long-standing dependence on crude oil exports, and it means the arrangement is, in practice, an oil revenue arrangement with a small number of other commodities attached.

The smaller sums are nevertheless significant in their own right. Gold brought in $108 million, minerals brought in $22 million, and fertiliser brought in $24.6 million. Together, those three categories account for roughly $155 million — a small fraction of the total, but a reminder that the American-controlled system covers more than oil alone. Venezuela’s gold and mineral trade has long been a source of controversy, with reports of illegal mining and smuggling, and the fact that gold sales were channelled through the same American-controlled account is part of the administration’s claim that the system brings order to a trade that was previously opaque.

The report says the money came from about 20 depositors, whose identities are redacted in the publicly released version. That number is small, and it tells its own story: Venezuela’s authorised export trade in 2026 was concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of buyers, most of them large commodity traders. The concentration matters, because it means the system’s outcomes depend heavily on the terms those few buyers received — and on whether the prices they paid were fair.

2. How the Account Works

The mechanics of the arrangement changed during the nine months the report covers, and the report traces that evolution in detail. The system began in a hurry, in the days after the January operation, and it was then formalised into a dedicated Treasury-controlled account. Understanding the two stages matters, because the early weeks were the least documented part of the whole arrangement, and the shift from one account to another is one of the questions lawmakers have asked about.

The basic flow, as the report describes it, runs like this. A buyer of Venezuelan oil or other resources — one of the verified and approved entities — deposits its payment into an American-controlled account. The Venezuelan central bank then requests the release of the proceeds. Officials from the United States State and Treasury departments have to sign off before the money moves. The money is then disbursed, mostly into foreign exchange auctions run by Venezuelan authorities, and in a smaller number of cases directly to vendors providing services to the Venezuelan government. At every stage, the decision to release the money rests with American officials, and the report is explicit that the funds remain subject to the Secretary of State’s determination of their disposition.

2.1 From Qatar National Bank to the US Treasury

In the first days of the arrangement, the United States set up an account at the Qatar National Bank to receive funds from entities looking to buy authorised Venezuelan oil and other minerals. Approximately $500 million was initially deposited into that account, and almost all of it was distributed back to Venezuelan entities by late January. The Qatar account was, in effect, a temporary holding arrangement — a place to put the money while the American government built a more permanent system.

By late January, a separate, dedicated account controlled directly by the United States Department of the Treasury was set up to handle future transactions. That account, held at Citibank according to reporting on the arrangement, has taken in more than $12 billion since then. The shift from a Qatari bank to a Treasury-controlled account at an American bank is significant. It moved the money from a foreign commercial bank into the direct control of the American government, and it made the Treasury the custodian of Venezuela’s export earnings in the most literal sense.

The report does not explain in detail why the Qatar account was chosen first, or why it was replaced so quickly. What is clear is that the two-stage structure created a seam in the record: the earliest money, roughly half a billion dollars, passed through a different account than the rest, and the documentation of that early period is thinner than what followed. That is one of the reasons the New York Times reporting on the KPMG document drew attention to the question of whether the report amounts to a full audit — a question the administration’s critics have pressed since the report’s release.

2.2 Who Signs Off on the Money

The report’s description of the release process is short, but it is the most important passage in the document for anyone trying to understand where power lies in the arrangement. Venezuela’s central bank requests the proceeds from the sale of the country’s resources. Officials from the United States State and Treasury departments must then approve the release. Only after that approval does the money move.

That sequence reverses the normal relationship between a country and its export earnings. In ordinary circumstances, a government sells its oil, receives the payment, and spends it as it chooses. Under this arrangement, Venezuela sells its oil, the payment goes to an American-controlled account, and the money comes back only when American officials agree. The report presents this as a safeguard — a way of ensuring the money is used for essential public services, macroeconomic stability and the rebuilding of key sectors such as energy, healthcare and infrastructure. The State Department official who briefed reporters anonymously said the account had supported exactly those purposes in its first nine months.

Critics read the same sequence differently. They point out that the power to delay or refuse a release is, in practice, the power to shape what the Venezuelan government can do. If Washington can decide when the money moves, it can decide, in effect, which Venezuelan priorities get funded and which do not. The report does not record any instance in which a release was refused, and it does not say whether any request was delayed. But the structure itself — the requirement of American sign-off — is the point on which the debate turns, and it is unlikely to be settled by this report alone.

3. Where the Money Went

The report says that $12.11 billion, or nearly 99 percent of the total deposited in the account, was disbursed by September 30. That is a very high disbursement rate, and the administration has presented it as evidence that the system works as intended: the money did not sit in Washington, it went back to Venezuela quickly. The New York Times, in its reporting on the KPMG document, noted that the speed of the transfers lends some credence to Washington’s claim that it is merely a custodian of the funds. But the same reporting also noted that the speed of the transfers does not answer the harder questions — above all, who ultimately received the money, and on what terms it was sold.

The report gives two broad destinations for the disbursed funds. Most of the money went to foreign exchange auctions run by Venezuelan authorities. A smaller amount, $133 million, went directly to vendors for services provided to the Venezuelan government. Beyond those two categories, the report’s public version is heavily redacted, and it does not provide details about the final recipients of the more than $12 billion that was distributed in Venezuela. It does note, however, that approximately $9.4 billion went to legal entities and $2.9 billion to individuals — a split that raises as many questions as it answers, since neither category is broken down further.

3.1 Foreign Exchange Auctions

The largest share of the money went into foreign exchange auctions run by Venezuelan authorities. In those auctions, the dollars released from the American-controlled account are sold to buyers inside Venezuela — businesses and others who need foreign currency to import goods, pay for services or settle debts. The auctions are, in effect, the mechanism by which Venezuela’s oil earnings are converted into the dollars that keep the country’s import-dependent economy running.

The New York Times has reported that large agribusinesses and consumer corporations had an advantage in getting dollars through these auctions, a finding that, if correct, would mean the benefits of the system flowed disproportionately to the biggest and best-connected firms. The KPMG report itself does not appear to address that question directly, and its public version does not name the recipients of auction funds. That gap is one of the main reasons critics say the report falls short of the formal audit that American officials had promised: it shows where the money entered the Venezuelan banking system, but it does not show who got to use it.

The auctions matter for another reason. Venezuela’s economy has been battered by years of sanctions, mismanagement and the collapse of oil production, and access to dollars is one of the scarcest and most valuable things in the country. Whoever controls the supply of dollars controls, in large measure, who can import food, medicine and machinery. The foreign exchange auctions are therefore not a technical detail. They are the point at which the American-controlled money becomes real purchasing power inside Venezuela, and the question of who benefits from them is a question about who benefits from the entire arrangement.

3.2 Direct Payments to Vendors

A much smaller share of the money — $133 million — went directly to vendors for services provided to the Venezuelan government. That is a little over one percent of the total disbursed, and it is the most direct form of spending in the whole system: money from the American-controlled account paid straight to companies providing services to Caracas, without passing through the foreign exchange auctions.

The report does not name the vendors, and it does not say what services they provided. That is a small sum in the context of $12 billion, but the principle is the same as with the auctions: the public version of the report shows that money was spent, but not on whom, or for what. For a system that was presented as a transparency measure, the absence of that detail is striking, and it is one of the points that lawmakers and journalists are likely to return to as they examine the report in the coming days.

It is also worth noting that the $133 million figure is separate from the $9.4 billion to legal entities and $2.9 billion to individuals that the report mentions. Those two figures appear to describe the recipients of the disbursed funds in broad terms, but the report does not explain how the vendor payments relate to them, or whether the auction proceeds are included in the $9.4 billion figure. The arithmetic of the report is, in places, difficult to follow — another reason its critics say it is not yet the full accounting that was promised.

4. The January Operation That Started It

None of this arrangement makes sense without the events of January 3, 2026. On that day, American forces carried out a military operation in Venezuela and seized President Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. President Trump said at a press conference the same day that Washington was ready to launch a larger second attack if necessary, and the next day he warned Delcy Rodriguez — then the vice president, who took over after Maduro’s removal — that she could pay a greater price than Maduro if she failed to do what he wanted. The operation, and the warning that followed it, set the terms on which the new arrangement was built.

The seizure of Maduro was the culmination of a campaign of pressure that had been building through late 2025, when Washington was seizing Venezuelan oil tankers and tightening the squeeze on the country’s main source of foreign currency. The January operation removed the head of state and, in the same stroke, gave the United States the leverage to dictate the terms on which Venezuela’s oil would be sold. Within days, the administration had established the special accounts that would hold the revenue, and within weeks, the interim government in Caracas had agreed to a system in which Washington would take a direct stake in the profits earned from the export of oil and other mineral resources.

4.1 The Seizure of Nicolas Maduro

Maduro had led Venezuela since 2013, and his government had been under American sanctions for years. The United States had long accused him of presiding over a criminal enterprise, and the January operation was presented by the administration as a law-enforcement action as much as a military one. Maduro was taken to the United States to face charges, and the operation was described by the administration as a success — a swift, decisive action that removed a leader Washington regarded as illegitimate.

Critics, including the government in Caracas and a number of international lawyers, have described the operation very differently, as an abduction and a violation of international law. The Al Jazeera account of the report’s release, for instance, refers to Maduro’s “abduction” rather than his seizure, and the debate over the legality of the operation has not been settled. What is not in dispute is the sequence of events: the operation happened on January 3, the revenue arrangement began immediately afterwards, and the report now being discussed covers the period from that very day. The $12.26 billion in the report is, in that sense, the financial record of the ten months that followed the removal of a head of state.

The operation also matters for the report because it explains why the system exists at all. The administration’s argument is that the seizure created a vacuum — a government in Caracas that was new, fragile and in need of American support — and that the revenue arrangement was the mechanism by which Washington could support that government while ensuring the money was not misused. The critics’ argument is that the operation created the leverage, and the arrangement is the use of that leverage: Venezuela’s oil money is released on Washington’s terms because Washington removed the man who might have objected.

4.2 The Executive Order and the Interim Government

President Trump issued an executive order in January establishing the special bank accounts that would hold revenue from Venezuelan oil and mineral transactions, to be eventually distributed back to Venezuela in a controlled manner. A further executive order, issued on January 9, recognised the covered proceeds as Venezuelan government property and shielded them from attachment by creditors — a provision that mattered because Venezuela owes large sums to bondholders and others, and because, without that protection, the money in the American-controlled accounts could have been seized to satisfy those debts.

Delcy Rodriguez, who had been Maduro’s vice president, took over after his removal and has since made agreements with Washington that gave the United States a direct stake in the profits from Venezuela’s oil and mineral exports. Her government is led by former allies of Maduro, and it works closely with Washington — a combination that has drawn criticism from both directions. Supporters of the old government see her as having capitulated to the power that removed Maduro; opponents of the old government see her as a continuation of it, kept in place because Washington found her useful.

The interim government’s position is, in any event, an unusual one. It governs a country whose main source of income is collected, held and released by a foreign government, and it depends on American approval for the money it needs to run the state. That dependence is the central fact of Venezuelan politics in 2026, and it is the fact that the $12 billion report makes visible in accounting terms. Whatever else the report does or does not show, it shows that Venezuela’s government now asks Washington for its own money, and that Washington decides when to hand it over.

5. The Traders Behind the Deposits

The money in the American-controlled account did not come from Venezuela itself. It came from the buyers of Venezuelan oil, and the report says there were about 20 of them. Their identities are redacted in the public version, but the New York Times reported that the majority of the deposits came from two commodity giants — Trafigura and Vitol — which were awarded special licences to sell Venezuela’s oil shortly after the January 3 operation. The two firms are among the largest independent commodity traders in the world, and their central role in the arrangement is one of the most consequential facts in the whole story.

The arrangement works, in outline, like this: the traders buy Venezuelan crude, often at a price below the market rate, and then resell it at a profit. The money they pay goes into the American-controlled account, and the money they earn from reselling the oil stays with them. The difference between the price they pay and the price they receive is their margin, and the size of that margin is one of the questions the report does not answer. If the traders bought cheaply and sold at full market prices, then a significant share of the value of Venezuela’s oil never reached the American-controlled account at all — it stayed with the traders. That is the question that lies behind much of the criticism of the report: it shows what was deposited, but it does not show whether Venezuela got a fair price.

5.1 Trafigura and Vitol

Trafigura and Vitol are not ordinary buyers. They are the world’s two largest independent oil traders, and they were given special licences by the American government to sell Venezuelan oil in the days after the January operation. The licences gave them privileged access to Venezuela’s crude at a moment when few other buyers were willing or able to handle it, and they have been the biggest depositors into the Treasury account ever since.

The scale of their role is difficult to overstate. If, as the New York Times reported, the majority of the $12.26 billion came from these two firms, then the American-controlled system is, in large part, a system for channelling payments from two commodity traders through Washington to Caracas. That concentration has advantages — it is easier to monitor a small number of large traders than a large number of small ones — but it also has risks. When so much of a country’s export revenue depends on two firms, the terms those firms receive matter enormously, and the question of whether they bought at a fair price becomes a question about whether Venezuela was fairly paid for its oil.

Reporting on the arrangement has suggested that the traders secured Venezuelan crude below market price before reselling it. That is a normal feature of commodity trading — traders buy at a discount and sell at a premium — but the size of the discount matters, and the report does not disclose it. The KPMG document, as described by the New York Times, gives little basis for judging whether Venezuela got fair prices for its oil, and that gap is one of the most serious criticisms levelled at the report. A system that is meant to protect Venezuela’s oil wealth should be able to show that the oil was sold for what it was worth.

5.2 The Vance Connection Claim

One of the more politically charged details in the reporting around the arrangement concerns Vitol and Vice President JD Vance. Reuters reported on Wednesday, November 11, that a Vitol gasoline trader’s ties to Vance helped the company secure its licence to sell Venezuelan oil. The report does not allege that the Vice President personally intervened, and the details of the connection have not been fully set out in public. But the claim has added a political dimension to a story that was already politically charged, and it is likely to be raised by lawmakers examining the report.

The significance of the claim lies in what it suggests about how the licences were awarded. The special licences to sell Venezuelan oil were among the most valuable permissions the American government handed out in the aftermath of the January operation, and the process by which they were awarded has not been fully explained. If personal connections played a role in who received them, that would raise questions about whether the arrangement was run in the interests of Venezuela, or in the interests of the firms and individuals closest to the administration. The report itself does not address the licensing process, and the Vance connection claim comes from Reuters reporting rather than from the KPMG document — but it is part of the same story, and it is likely to feature in the debate that follows the report’s release.

It is important to be precise about what is and is not established here. Reuters reported that a trader’s ties to the Vice President helped Vitol secure its licence. That is a reported claim, not a finding of the KPMG report, and the full details have not been made public. The claim has not been confirmed by the administration, and it should be treated as an allegation that requires further reporting rather than as an established fact. What is established is that Vitol received a special licence, that it became one of the biggest depositors into the Treasury account, and that the process by which those licences were awarded has not been publicly explained.

6. The Transparency Questions

The State Department presented the report as an exercise in transparency, and in one sense it is: before its release, the public knew almost nothing about how much money had passed through the American-controlled accounts, or where it had gone. The report answers the first of those questions in detail, and it answers the second in part. But the report also leaves large gaps, and those gaps are the focus of the criticism that has followed its release.

The most important gap is the simplest one: the report does not say who ultimately received the money. It says that $9.4 billion went to legal entities and $2.9 billion to individuals, but it does not name them, and it does not say what they did with the money. It does not say whether the oil was sold at fair prices. It does not say whether any release was delayed or refused. And it does not, according to the New York Times, amount to the formal audit that American officials had promised. KPMG helped administer the account and trace transactions, but the report that resulted falls short of a full audit, and it gives little basis for judging whether Venezuela got a fair deal.

6.1 Redacted Names and Missing Recipients

The State Department redacted the names of the depositors in the publicly released version of the report, and the names of the final recipients are not provided at all. The redactions are presumably justified on grounds of commercial confidentiality or security, but they mean that the public cannot verify the most basic facts about the system: who paid the money, and who received it. A transparency report that does not name the parties it describes is, at best, a partial transparency report.

The missing recipients are the more serious gap. The report shows where much of the money entered the Venezuelan banking system, through the foreign exchange auctions, but it does not follow the money to its final users. The reader can see that $12.11 billion was disbursed, and that $9.4 billion went to legal entities and $2.9 billion to individuals, but the reader cannot see which entities, or which individuals, or what they spent it on. That is not a minor omission. It is the difference between knowing that money was spent and knowing whether it was spent well.

The administration’s defenders argue that the redactions are necessary, and that the report is a significant step forward from the near-total secrecy that preceded it. That is a fair point, as far as it goes: the report does disclose the totals, the sources and the broad destinations of the money, and that is more than was publicly known before. But the defenders’ argument does not answer the critics’ central complaint, which is that a report that shows the totals without showing the recipients cannot settle the question of whether the system worked as intended. The debate is likely to continue, and it is likely to focus on whether a fuller, unredacted version of the report is provided to Congress.

6.2 The $4.7 Billion Deduction Claim

One of the most striking claims in the reporting around the arrangement did not come from the KPMG report itself. A Venezuelan government adviser, Luigi Pisella, has stated that the Trump administration deducted around $4.7 billion from the revenues to cover the costs of its January 3 military operation. If that claim is correct, it would mean that more than a third of the money in the American-controlled account was kept back to pay for the operation that created the account in the first place.

The KPMG report, as described in public reporting, does not appear to confirm the $4.7 billion deduction, and the figure is difficult to reconcile with the report’s own numbers. The report says that $12.26 billion was taken in and $12.11 billion was disbursed — a difference of only about $150 million, plus the $169 million remaining in the account. If $4.7 billion had been deducted, the disbursement figure would be far lower. The discrepancy may reflect a difference in accounting — the deduction may have been taken before the money entered the account, for instance, or it may relate to a different period — but it has not been explained in public, and it is one of the questions that the report’s release has raised rather than answered.

There is also a separate discrepancy in the totals. A Financial Times investigation had previously estimated $13 billion of American-controlled Venezuelan funds in the first half of the year alone — a figure higher than the $12.26 billion the KPMG report records for the first nine months. The two figures may cover different things, or they may reflect different methods of counting, but the gap is large enough to have drawn attention, and it is another reason the report is likely to be scrutinised closely. The administration has presented the report as the definitive account of the money; the discrepancies suggest that the definitive account may not yet have been given.

7. Venezuela’s Oil Industry in 2026

The revenue arrangement exists because Venezuela has oil, and the state of the country’s oil industry is the background to everything the report describes. Venezuela holds some of the largest proven oil reserves in the world, but its production has collapsed over the past decade, from more than 2 million barrels a day to a little over 1 million. The industry has been battered by sanctions, by underinvestment, by the loss of skilled workers and by the decay of infrastructure. The $12 billion that passed through the American-controlled account is, in that context, both a large sum and a reminder of how much smaller the industry has become: at full production, Venezuela’s oil would be worth far more.

The interim government has pledged to raise production to 1.3 million barrels a day before the end of the year, but the latest monthly OPEC report placed October’s production at 1.158 million barrels a day, according to secondary sources, and output has stagnated in recent months. The gap between the pledge and the reality is a measure of how difficult it is to rebuild an industry that has been starved of investment for years, and it is also a measure of how much depends on the American-controlled money: the funds released from the Treasury account are meant, in part, to rebuild the energy sector, but the rebuilding has not yet produced the production gains that were promised.

7.1 Production and the ExxonMobil Return

One of the most significant developments in the Venezuelan oil industry this week was the return of ExxonMobil. On Monday, November 9, the acting Rodriguez government and ExxonMobil signed a memorandum of understanding as the oil giant prepares to return to Venezuela nearly two decades after having its assets nationalised. The agreement is a landmark in the history of the industry: ExxonMobil was one of the largest foreign operators in Venezuela before the nationalisations of the 2000s, and its return signals that the interim government is willing to welcome back the companies that were once driven out.

The ExxonMobil agreement is also a sign of how the American-controlled revenue system fits into a wider restructuring of the Venezuelan oil industry. The administration has been mediating oil agreements and overseeing legislative changes, and the return of major American oil companies is part of a plan to revive production with foreign capital and expertise. Whether that plan works will depend on whether the companies are willing to invest the large sums required to rebuild the industry, and whether the political and legal framework in Caracas gives them enough confidence to do so. The memorandum of understanding is a first step, not a final agreement, and the details of any eventual investment have not been made public.

There are other signs of the same trend. An Israeli firm is reported to be eyeing a stake in a Venezuelan oil producer, and the interim government has been in talks with a range of foreign companies. The picture that emerges is of an oil industry being reopened to the world after years of isolation, with the American government acting as the gatekeeper. The $12 billion report is, in that sense, not just an accounting of the past nine months. It is a preview of the system under which Venezuela’s oil will be sold for the foreseeable future — a system in which Washington controls the money, foreign companies control the production, and Caracas depends on both.

7.2 What the Money Means for Ordinary Venezuelans

The question that matters most to the people of Venezuela is not how much money passed through an American account, but what it did for them. The State Department says the account supported the use of Venezuela’s oil and other natural resource revenues for essential public services, macroeconomic stability and the rebuilding of key sectors such as energy, healthcare and infrastructure. If that is true, then the $12 billion should have made a visible difference to the lives of ordinary Venezuelans — to the availability of food and medicine, to the functioning of hospitals and schools, and to the stability of the currency.

Whether it has done so is difficult to establish from the report alone, because the report does not trace the money to its final uses. The foreign exchange auctions, through which most of the money was disbursed, are meant to supply dollars to the businesses that import the goods Venezuelans need. If large agribusinesses and consumer corporations had an advantage in those auctions, as the New York Times has reported, then the benefits of the system may have flowed first to the biggest firms, and only indirectly to the people who buy their products. That is not necessarily a failure — large firms are also the ones that import food and medicine — but it is a distribution of benefits that the report does not examine.

The deeper question is whether the arrangement has improved the lives of ordinary Venezuelans at all. Venezuela’s economy has been in crisis for a decade, and the January operation and the revenue arrangement that followed it were presented as a break with the past — a chance to rebuild. Ten months on, the report shows that the money was collected and largely returned. It does not show whether the money rebuilt the hospitals, stabilised the currency or fed the people. Those are the questions that Venezuelans will ask, and they are the questions that the report, for all its detail, does not answer.

8. The Bottom Line

The State Department’s report is the first detailed public accounting of an extraordinary arrangement, and it deserves to be read as such. It shows that the United States handled more than $12.26 billion of Venezuela’s oil and mineral revenues in the first nine months of 2026, that nearly all of it was disbursed, and that the money flowed mostly through foreign exchange auctions run by Venezuelan authorities. It shows that the system was built in a hurry after the seizure of Nicolas Maduro, that it was formalised into a Treasury-controlled account, and that it placed the decision about when Venezuela’s money is released in the hands of American officials. Those are significant facts, and they are now on the public record.

But the report is also, by its own terms, an incomplete accounting. It does not name the depositors, it does not name the final recipients, it does not show whether the oil was sold at fair prices, and it does not amount to the formal audit that was promised. The discrepancies with earlier estimates, the $4.7 billion deduction claim, and the questions about the licensing of Trafigura and Vitol all remain unresolved. The report answers the question of how much money passed through Washington. It does not answer the question of whether the arrangement was fair to Venezuela — and that is the question on which its legacy will ultimately be judged.

8.1 What Is Confirmed

Several facts are now confirmed by the report and the reporting around it. The United States handled more than $12.26 billion of Venezuelan oil and mineral revenues between January 3 and September 30, 2026, according to the KPMG report made public by the State Department on November 12. More than $12.1 billion of that total came from oil, petroleum products and natural gas, with gold, minerals and fertiliser accounting for the remainder. Nearly 99 percent of the money deposited — $12.11 billion — was disbursed by September 30, with about $169 million remaining in the account. Most of the disbursed money went to foreign exchange auctions run by Venezuelan authorities, and $133 million went directly to vendors. The arrangement was established by executive order after the January 3 operation in which American forces seized Nicolas Maduro, and the funds are held as the sovereign property of Venezuela, subject to disposition by the United States Secretary of State.

It is also confirmed that the report was dated October 29, transmitted to Congress in early November, and first reported by the New York Times on Tuesday, November 10, before its public release on Thursday. The depositors numbered about 20, and the majority of the deposits came from Trafigura and Vitol, according to the New York Times. The account began at the Qatar National Bank, with about $500 million deposited, before being replaced by a dedicated Treasury-controlled account. Venezuela’s oil production stood at 1.158 million barrels a day in October, according to the latest OPEC report, and ExxonMobil signed a memorandum of understanding with the interim government on November 9 to prepare its return to the country. These are the facts on which the record now stands.

8.2 What Remains Unanswered

What remains unanswered is, in many ways, more important than what is confirmed. It is unconfirmed whether Venezuela received fair prices for its oil, and whether the discounts taken by Trafigura and Vitol were reasonable. It is unconfirmed who the final recipients of the $12.11 billion were, beyond the broad split of $9.4 billion to legal entities and $2.9 billion to individuals. It is unconfirmed whether any release of funds was delayed or refused, and whether the foreign exchange auctions favoured large corporations over smaller businesses and ordinary Venezuelans. It is unconfirmed whether the $4.7 billion deduction claimed by a Venezuelan government adviser was in fact taken, and how that claim can be reconciled with the report’s own figures. It is unconfirmed how the Financial Times’ earlier estimate of $13 billion in the first half of the year alone can be reconciled with the KPMG report’s $12.26 billion for nine months. It is unconfirmed whether the licensing of Trafigura and Vitol was influenced by personal connections, including the reported ties between a Vitol trader and Vice President JD Vance. And it is unconfirmed whether the money, for all its scale, has improved the lives of ordinary Venezuelans — whether the hospitals are better stocked, the currency more stable, and the shelves better filled than they were before the arrangement began. The coming days will provide the answers.

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