Venezuela News — Private capital is moving into Venezuela fast

Two dozen oil companies have until July 28, 2026, to rewrite their contracts with PDVSA, and Chevron, Repsol and Eni are among them. Washington is separately weighing the release of about $11 billion in Venezuelan assets frozen abroad to pay for earthquake reconstruction. Brazil's Batista brothers bought their way into the Orinoco belt while everyone else was filing paperwork.

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Venezuela holds the July 28 deadline for oil companies to rewrite their PDVSA contracts. Venezuela's oil ministry told PDVSA's partners it will not move the July 28 deadline to migrate existing oil and gas contracts to the legal framework Venezuela's National Assembly approved in January. About two dozen foreign and local companies are affected, including Chevron, Spain's Repsol and Italy's Eni, most of them with more than one project. Companies entering Venezuela for the first time have no deadline. Reuters

The Trump administration weighs releasing $11 billion of Venezuela's frozen money for earthquake rebuilding. The Trump administration and Venezuelan officials are exploring how to unlock more than $11 billion in Venezuelan assets frozen abroad to fund earthquake reconstruction without asking U.S. taxpayers for more. Roughly $5 billion sits as reserve credits at the International Monetary Fund, $4 billion to $4.5 billion in gold sits at the Bank of England, and the rest is oil-sale money held in accounts the U.S. Treasury controls. Washington has committed $386 million of its own so far. Bloomberg

Brazilian billionaires, the Batista, brothers buy a 49% stake in a PDVSA oil venture. Fluxus Oil, Gas & Energy, the energy arm of Joesley and Wesley Batista, the Brazilian brothers behind the JBS meatpacking empire, acquired A&B Oil and Gas and with it a 49% stake in Petrolera Roraima, a joint venture with PDVSA in the Orinoco heavy oil belt that ConocoPhillips ran until the 2007 expropriation. The venture pumps about 30,000 barrels a day and the partners want 120,000 within five years. Terms were not disclosed. Bloomberg

Venezuelan buy-now-pay-later app, Cashea, raises $100 million from global investors. Cashea, the Caracas company that lets Venezuelans split everyday purchases into zero-interest installments, closed a $40 million Series A in March led by Spice Expeditions and a $60 million Series B in June led by FinSight Ventures. Backers include Endeavor Catalyst, Plug and Play and the endowment of Washington University in St. Louis. The company says all $100 million will be invested inside Venezuela. PR Newswire

Energy Sector

Miami investment firm, Lionheart Capital, lines up $400 million for a Venezuelan oil field stake. Lionheart Capital, the Miami firm run by Ophir Sternberg, signed a non-binding letter of intent to buy out Sweden's Keo Capital AB in the PetroUrdaneta field, paying $400 million in shares of a new Nasdaq-listed company. The parties expect to close before August 17. Lionheart lined up $2.25 billion in commitments for Venezuelan oil in June. Banca y Negocios

Refineries start buying Venezuelan oil directly from PDVSA, and the trading houses lose their cut. PDVSA is going back to the model it used before the 2019 sanctions, selling directly to its joint-venture partners and to refineries instead of through intermediaries. Phillips 66 started buying spot cargoes in May after a seven-year pause and took three cargoes of Merey 16 heavy crude in July, India's Reliance Industries also began buying directly in May, and Valero and Thailand's Tipco Asphalt are expected to follow. Vitol and Trafigura still handle most exports under January contracts overseen by Washington that let them lift more than 100 million barrels for resale in six months. Reuters

GE Vernova says it will start work on Venezuela's power grid this year. Chief Executive Scott Strazik said the company is exchanging draft contracts with Corpoelec, Venezuela's state electricity utility, and would have signed already if the June earthquakes had not intervened. Under an agreement signed last month, GE Vernova will first rehabilitate the 11 gigawatts of capacity it already has installed in the country before adding anything new. Bloomberg

Economy

OKX launches a free Visa card in Venezuela that spends USDT directly. The virtual Visa Platinum card carries no issuance or maintenance fee and draws on a user's USDT, USDC or USDG balance at online merchants without a manual conversion step. Applicants need an OKX account and identity verification using Venezuelan documents. OKX paired the launch with a campaign distributing 15 USDT to 2,000 users after the earthquakes. BeInCrypto

World Bank puts earthquake damage at $19.6 billion and warns rebuilding could take a decade. The World Bank's rapid damage assessment, built from satellite imagery and engineering models, attributes 47% of the destruction to homes, 27% to infrastructure and 26% to other buildings. La Guaira state and the Capital District account for roughly half the total. At current investment levels the Bank says reconstruction would still be unfinished after ten years, and it is working with the Inter-American Development Bank and CAF on financing. World Bank

Other Industries

A repair ship arrives to fix the undersea cable carrying almost all of Venezuela's internet traffic. The June 24 earthquakes snapped the South American Crossing cable 1.8 kilometers off the Puerto Viejo station on the Caracas coast, cutting the country's international capacity in half. The cable carries 99% of Venezuela's international data traffic, which is why banking and payments have been intermittent for a month. Owner Cirion Technologies sent the repair vessel Wave Sentinel, which arrived on July 22, and estimates 15 days of work. Guacamaya

Opinion

Venezuela's transition roadmap starts August 1, and none of the players want it to move at the same speed. Statements from Venezuela's National Assembly and the U.S. State Department set August 1 as the launch date for a roadmap toward a political transition. Writing in Caracas Chronicles, Alejandro Reverón argues the first steps are a new board for the CNE, Venezuela's electoral council, and 12 new Supreme Court justices, seats created when the court was expanded from 20 to 32 in May. Both votes run through the National Assembly, where Jorge Rodríguez holds the majority, and no timeline has been published. Caracas Chronicles

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