US tally of Venezuela oil cash falls billions short of estimates

… <p>The 53-page Report on Venezuela Custody Account Operations, <a href="https://www.state.gov/report-on-venezuela-custody-account-operations">released</a> by the State Department on November 12 and prepared with accounting firm KPMG, traces payments from buyers of Venezuelan oil, gold, minerals and fertiliser into a US Treasury account between January 3 and September 30. It records $12.11bn disbursed and $168.56mn still in custody at the end of September.</p> <p>“The report shows the process is working,” a State Department official said, according to&nbsp;<em>Reuters</em>. The document itself states the money is “held and managed exclusively for the benefit of the Venezuelan people”.</p> <p>The report is the first official tally since US forces seized former president Nicolás Maduro in January and Washington took charge of who buys Venezuela’s crude and where the money goes. It lands as Democrats, who won both chambers of Congress in last week’s midterms, promise closer scrutiny of the oil arrangements the Trump administration stitched together with the government of acting President Delcy Rodríguez. Yet it is a ledger of the money Washington chose to route through its own account, not of Venezuela’s oil income. It does not say how much the crude earned in total, names none of the buyers, and offers little evidence that the dollars improved life for Venezuelans rather than the balance sheets of importers.</p> …