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Six months after the U.S. government announced it would begin gold imports from Venezuela following years of sanctions prevented the trade, the first major tranche of gold from the deal is still in storage, OCCRP has learned.
The gold is being held by commodities-trading giant Trafigura, which became the first international firm to take advantage of relaxed U.S. restrictions on purchasing Venezuelan gold in March, in what the White House touted as a “historic” deal.
"All gold Trafigura has purchased from Venezuela to-date is currently in storage, under Trafigura's control,” a Trafigura spokesperson told OCCRP in early September.
The firm declined to comment on why the gold had not been sold yet in the U.S., but experts said the hold-up could be related to supply-chain issues. Venezuelan gold is extracted from a lawless and violent region, and it may be difficult to meet U.S. requirements to show it has been produced ethically.
In the aftermath of the U.S. operation to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores, and spirit them away to New York to stand trial, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum led a delegation to Caracas. After meeting with Interim President Delcy Rodriguez on March 5 and 6 he announced an agreement for Trafigura to buy up to 1 metric ton of Venezuelan gold dore — semi-refined gold that would then be transported to the U.S. to be refined and sold.
As part of the deal, Trafigura agreed to buy gold only from the state gold mining company Minerven. Trafigura told OCCRP in March that it was working “to implement a responsible sourcing programme.”
“An independent third-party auditing firm and LBMA-approved assurance provider has visited and assessed the main Minerven sites we are sourcing from under our contract," a Trafigura spokesperson said on September 20.
"To date, no human rights violations, conflict-financing, illegal taxation, extortion, or involvement of illegal actors have been identified at the sites assessed," the spokesperson added in an email.
Venezuelan gold had been off-limits to American buyers for seven years, since the first Trump administration's Treasury Department in 2019 sanctioned Minerven for a scheme in which it bought gold from small-scale miners at below-market rates using nearly worthless Bolivar currency. The U.S. also accused the Maduro regime of allowing local criminal gangs to exert de facto control over the gold sector, leading to widespread environmental destruction and severe human rights abuses.
In the U.S. president’s second term, his administration unwound that ban at what officials called "Trump speed." Within the space of a single week in March, the Trafigura deal was struck, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control issued a new license authorizing some gold purchases from Venezuela, and Venezuela restructured Minerven, merging it with a larger state mining firm. The government also introduced a new law to lure back wary foreign investors by cracking down on illegal mining and taking other measures to clean up the sector.
But the U.S. had also said that gold imported from Venezuela would be required to “meet standards of U.S. law,” and the new license easing sanctions on Venezuelan gold requires importers to file “documentation demonstrating supply chain due diligence plans to determine the chain of custody of the gold.”
David Soud, an expert on illicit gold flows and the head of research at strategic consulting firm I.R. Consilium, told OCCRP that this is not easy in practice.
"You have to source the gold from a mine that you can ring-fence... so that you see your gold come out of the ground and you see it go through that processing plant,” he told OCCRP.
“You have eyes on it through the point of export. You have to have visibility on it the entire way," said Soud.
This is very difficult in the Orinoco belt in Venezuela’s heavily jungled south, where much of the country’s gold is mined. For nearly two decades the area has been relatively lawless, dominated by local criminal groups known as ‘sindicatos’ that control most mining there, and force small-scale miners to pay fees in exchange for being allowed to work.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights has also documented serious abuses in the region, including trafficking and sexual exploitation, while environmental groups have said the lawlessness of gold extraction there has caused widespread environmental destruction.
Although the political reality in Venezuela has changed this year, the on-the-ground situation in Orinoco has not, according to recent field-monitoring reports by SOS Orinoco, a local environmental group that works in the area. One report, covering a four-month period between April and August, found the region was still dominated by criminal syndicates, despite government efforts to eliminate them. It also found continuing ecological damage from gold mining.
“The GAOs [illegal armed groups] continue to be the key operational actors in all social and economic dynamics in southern Venezuela,” the report concluded. It found “no evidence on the ground” that legitimate actors had entered the gold-mining sector as a result of the new U.S. license.
“Nothing has changed south of the Orinoco since January 3,” said Cristina Vollmer, executive director of SOS Orinoco. “If anything, the situation has gotten worse.”
The U.S. Treasury Department declined to comment specifically on funds derived from Venezuelan gold exports. A U.S. government official said that, in general, “compliance monitoring is in place” for proceeds of products exported by the Venezuelan state to the U.S.
“In safeguarding Venezuelan revenue, the U.S. government as custodian has been working with the Rodriguez government since January to quickly disperse funds for official government expenditures, including payroll for government employees, and to ensure liquidity in the Venezuelan system,” the official said.
NOTE: This story has been updated with a comment from Trafigura.
