Venezuela arrests former Maduro allies in oil corruption probe

Venezuela’s former oil minister Tareck El Aissami, once a powerful confidante of authoritarian president Nicolás Maduro, has been arrested on allegations of corruption, the socialist government announced on Tuesday.

Former finance minister Simón Zerpa and Sarmark López, a businessman and associate of El Aissami, were also arrested as part of the probe into alleged corruption at state oil major Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA), a critical source of government revenue.

Tarek William Saab, Venezuela’s attorney-general, said in a press conference on Tuesday that El Aissami and his co-conspirators were involved in a scheme to directly manage shipments of crude in avoidance of US sanctions, without sending the payments through the country’s central bank. Doing so also allowed them to speculate on currency markets, Saab alleged.

Saab said the three men, once powerful allies of Maduro, face charges of treason, money laundering and misdirection of public funds. They were, Saab said, part of a cabal of more than 50 people plotting to “destroy Venezuela’s economy” from both Venezuela and the US, and that “the way these three subjects behaved is an economic conspiracy”.

Images released by the Venezuela’s communications ministry on Tuesday showed a handcuffed El Aissami, dressed in a black T-shirt and grey trousers, being escorted by balaclava-clad police officers along a hallway. El Aissami had not been seen publicly since resigning from his post as oil minister in March 2023 amid a wider probe into corruption at PDVSA.

Observers see the probe as a purge by Maduro of former allies that exposed tensions at the top of the government. 

El Aissami, who used his Syrian and Lebanese parentage to open up new business channels to Iran and Turkey while in Maduro’s good graces, is also wanted for allegedly facilitating drug trafficking from Venezuela by the US government, which has offered a $10mn reward.

Zerpa and López are also under US sanctions. Venezuela boasts the world’s largest oil reserves, though economic mismanagement and corruption have throttled production. Graft investigations inside Venezuela are likely to raise eyebrows, with Transparency International ranking the South American country 177 out of 180 on its corruption perception index.

The arrests announced on Tuesday come at a sensitive time for Maduro, who is running for re-election in July this year. In order to entice Maduro to permit a “free and fair” election, Washington relaxed strict sanctions on the country’s oil, gas, and mining sectors with the caveat that they would be reimposed on April 18 if political reforms were not taken.

Since then, the government-stacked supreme court has upheld a ban on opposition leader María Corina Machado standing as a candidate, while several of her aides have been arrested, leading the US to threaten to reimpose sanctions later this month.