Vera Bergengruen
speaker
262 appearances
4 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 1 Sep
Vera Bergengruen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So within the US government, the energy secretary, Chris Wright, who went to Caracas, uh, Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, and strangely enough, the Pentagon, which w was brought in rather late, but it has an obscure office that they realized could help called the Office of Strategic Capital, OSC, which most people had never heard of.
A lot of the negotiators said they'd never heard of it.
A lot of my colleagues said they'd never heard of it.
It
something very unusual, which was treat access to Venezuelan oil as a national security matter, as a strategic asset.
And basically they found a loophole where they could claim that and then use this office as their preferred mechanism to have the US government take a direct stake in Venezuelan oil.
The person they settled on is Alejandro Betancourt.
He's a controversial Venezuelan businessman who made a fortune doing business during the Chavez era.
he's part of this generation of really wealthy Venezuelan deal makers, in other words.
They're called the Borichicos, and they're people who really benefited from their connections with Chavez to make a lot of money.
Because of his connections, Betancourt had been a behind the scenes person for a while with some of these Trump linked officials or operators.
Uh, you know, he had a line in to Delcy Rodriguez, he was talking to her already, asked the US was getting ready to take out Maduro.
What made him attractive to the administration and the argument that people made to Trump and to the White House was that he had something that all these big American oil companies didn't.
He already had operations on the ground, he had these relationships in Caracas, but more importantly, he had the willingness to move extremely quickly without as much of a concern for the risks.
We're still unraveling a lot of the details of how this is actually going to work.
But for what's on paper right now that we have reported and the White House has confirmed, the US basically gets a 35% stake in this company owned by Betancourt.
And then they get the right to buy 20% of its oil production at cost.
So basically, they get first dibs and they get to do it more cheaply.
And by doing that, they get access to a lot of this oil.
in a way that Trump can really sell.
Showing 41–60 of 262 · page 3 of 14
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