US releases report on $12 billion from Venezuelan oil and mineral resources | Economic and commercial news

The report seeks to address concerns about the Trump administration’s handling of revenues held in trust for Venezuela.

The U.S. State Department has released a report detailing what the United States did with more than $12 billion in revenue from Venezuela’s oil and mineral resources, nearly a year after the country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, was kidnapped.

The disclosure is part of an effort to “promote transparency and accountability in the management of these funds,” says the 53-page report released Thursday.

In January, U.S. forces carried out a raid on the Venezuelan capital, Caracas, capturing Maduro and his wife and taking them to New York, where they now face charges related to drug trafficking and torture.

Delcy Rodriguez, then vice president of Venezuela, took over after Maduro’s kidnapping and has since reached agreements with Washington under which the United States participates directly in profits from the export of oil and other mineral resources from the South American country.

Since ousting Maduro from power, the Trump administration has sought direct control over who buys Venezuela’s natural resources and who profits from those sales.

US President Donald Trump issued an executive order in January creating special bank accounts that would hold revenue from these transactions, which would then be redistributed to Venezuela in a controlled manner.

Trump has made Venezuela a central part of his political narrative, touting the revenue he said the United States would receive from the sale of the country’s oil on the campaign trail ahead of midterm elections held earlier this month. Venezuelan human rights activists have expressed concern that Washington may place an outsized emphasis on oil revenues and show little interest in supporting democratic reforms after Maduro’s removal.

The report released Thursday covers inflows and outflows from U.S.-controlled accounts between Jan. 3, 2026, and Sept. 30, 2026. The State Department also hired private auditing firm KPMG, based in Washington, D.C., to review the transactions.

The United States collected more than $12.26 billion from “verified and approved entities engaging in authorized activities” in Venezuela during that period, according to the report. Most of this flow came from crude oil and oil revenues, but it also included deposits from transactions involving gold, minerals and fertilizers.

More than $12 billion of that revenue had been disbursed as of Sept. 30, with about $169 million remaining in the account, according to the report.

The United States initially opened an account at the National Bank of Qatar in January to receive funds from entities seeking to purchase oil and other permitted minerals from Venezuela. Approximately $500 million was initially deposited into this account, with almost all of it redistributed to Venezuelan entities in late January, when a separate account, dedicated and controlled by the U.S. Treasury, was created to handle future transactions.

The checking account, controlled directly by the US Treasury Department, collected more than $12 billion in funds, from around 20 depositors, whose identities are redacted in the State Department report. About 99 percent of these funds were linked to the purchase of oil, according to the report.

By the end of September, the State Department report said, almost all of those funds had been distributed to a collection of Venezuelan banks, to be used in foreign exchange interventions, transactions in which banks sell those dollars to reduce the amount of floating local currency and prop up the value of the currency, in this case the Venezuelan bolivar.

The report is heavily redacted and does not provide details on the ultimate beneficiaries of the more than $12 billion in funds distributed to Venezuela, although it notes that approximately $9.4 billion went to “legal entities” and $2.9 billion to “natural persons.”