Rick De La Torre
speaker
272 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 13 Jun
Rick De La Torre’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, look, I take the overarching strategy of limiting barrels of oil going to our enemies like China is certainly working out very well, right?
Those barrels are not going there.
Recent reports show that most of our oil came to the United States, then in second place was India, and then half a dozen smaller regional allied countries received the remaining balance of barrels of oil.
The challenge I found, and by the way, you know, I represent bias in the oil and gas sector.
We were down there, you know, getting amazing, by the way, amazing support from our State Department colleagues and certainly pointing us in the right direction and, you know, bridging those introductions that are desperately needed with the government.
So, you know, we can certainly rely on the U.S.
government for that.
When you start dealing then with the Venezuelan government, that's really where you need those experts, right?
Because although the overarching oil business is certainly positive, like I said, not going to China, coming to us, you as an individual investor, you playing in that oil and gas business, sometimes there are some remnants within the Venezuelan oil ministry, PDVSA, PDVSA, PDVSA is the one that manages and controls oil
uh oil exports oil production all the licensing um there are still br threats in there that are playing stupid games that are that are trying to you know uh to try to get kickbacks or trying to get uh investors to look the other way or trying to insert themselves into some of these deals and get some sort of griff
Those are the things that are still difficult to deal with.
And as you know, right, as much as our State Department colleagues or our Congress colleagues want to engage in that kind of stuff, it's rather difficult for them from the embassy position and dealing with foreign governments.
So, again, you really need an expert out there to call them out on that stuff and say, yeah, that's not right.
I'll share with you one brief example of a client of mine, right?
Brazilian-American client owns, I think, like a $20 million business outside of Houston.
They've been living in Caracas for about three or four years.
They got the concession under Maduro when they bought the concession for the oil field.
At that time, the Maduro regime said, yeah, not a problem.
We'll sell you the concession, but you're going to put this guy, this Venezuelan guy, he's on your board of directors now, and you've got to pay him X amount every year, right?
So when there was a, you know, when there was an oil crisis and barrels of oil were selling at whatever, $20, $30, $40, and you couldn't, you know, you couldn't pump enough barrel at a profitable base to pay this guy, didn't matter.
Showing 141–160 of 272 · page 8 of 14
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