Podcasts · Patrick Boyle On Finance

Where is Venezuela’s oil money?

27 Jul 2026 · 38 min · S6 E30

When the United States took control of Venezuela's oil exports in early 2026, it collected an estimated $13 billion in crude sales — but the official ledger in Caracas records almost none of it, and six months on there is still no public accounting of where the money went. In this video we look at what happened to Venezuela's sovereign wealth: the missing oil revenues now sitting in an offshore account in Qatar, the four billion dollars of Venezuelan gold frozen in the vaults of the Bank of England that no one can legally claim, and the court-ordered auction that handed Citgo's parent company to an affiliate of Paul Singer's Elliott Management for nearly $6 billion. Along the way we explain the legal machinery that makes all of this possible — the alter ego doctrine, sovereign immunity and the Bancec ruling, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, and the "one voice" principle in English law — and the broader lesson for anyone trying to understand sovereign assets: a nation's wealth held abroad is only yours for as long as someone else's courts, banks and vaults agree that it is. We also cover the aftermath of the June earthquakes, the international relief effort, and why the question of who legitimately governs Venezuela sits at the centre of every one of these disputes.

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Statistics For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3eerLA0

Derivatives For The Trading Floor: https://amzn.to/3cjsyPF

Corporate Finance: https://amzn.to/3fn3rvC

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• https://amzn.to/3cjsyPF
• https://amzn.to/3fn3rvC
• https://www.patreon.com/PatrickBoyleOnFinance

The episode on the publisher’s site ↗ (opens in a new tab)