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How Paul Singer Stole Venezuela’s Crown Jewel
About a month ago, on November 25, 2025, a US judge approved the sale of Citgo Petroleum Corporation (CITGO), a subsidiary of Venezuela’s a state-owned oil company, to Amber Energy, a subsidiary of Paul Singer’s Elliott Management.
Venezuela rejected the legitimacy of the sale, with the Maduro administration calling it “fraudulent process,” a “barbaric theft, ”and “the theft of the century.”
The sale price for CITGO was $5.9 billion, with the proceeds flowing to creditors of the Venezuelan state. The acquisition is expected to be finalized sometime next year, pending regulatory approval... Maduro was the obstacle blocking that approval, but now he’s gone.
On a fundamentals basis, CITGO is worth far more than what Singer paid for it. Valuations during the auction ranged from $10 billion to $20 billion, depending on methodology and assumptions. Evercore, the investment bank advising the court-supervised sale, placed CITGO’s value at roughly $13 billion, while the Venezuelan government has argued the company is worth north of $20 billion.
The reason CITGO sold for a fraction of its real value is simple: U.S. sanctions and non-recognition of the Maduro government made Venezuela radioactive to investors. Most serious buyers would not touch the asset. Financing dried up. The auction never became competitive. What should have been a sale turned into a clearance event, with one vulture left standing.
What great luck for Paul Singer, then, that only one month after his purchase was approved, Trump invaded Venezuela and turned it into a puppet state, declaring that all the oil now belonged to American investors!
Singer himself has acted as a financial attack dog for Trump during his first year back in office. In June, he contributed $1 million to fund a super PAC aiming to oust Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who'd become Trump's leading Republican critic over his Department of Justice's refusal to release its files pertaining to the billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

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Venezuela has greater oil stores than any other country. But after years of corruption, mismanagement and more recently U.S. sanctions, its oil output has dropped to a tenth of what it was two decades ago.
From Lake Maracaibo in the west to the Orinoco oil belt in the east, abandoned wells rust in the sun as looters scavenge the metal. The last drilling rig still working in Venezuela shut down in August. The country is on course, by the end of this year, to be pumping little more oil than the state of Wyoming.
“Twenty percent of the world’s oil is in Venezuela, but what good is it if we can’t monetize it?” said Carlos Mendoza, an ambassador under the late socialist president Hugo Chávez, who enjoyed an oil bonanza when prices were high but starved the industry of investment and maintenance funds.
“We’re entering a post-oil era,” Mr. Mendoza said.
While petroleum is under stress world-wide from climate-change concerns and the rise of wind and solar power, what is happening to oil in Venezuela goes far beyond the global industry’s troubles. It is an existential crisis for a country long dependent on oil for nearly all of its hard-currency earnings.
This year, Venezuela’s oil income will probably fall below the limited funds coming in from other sources such as gold mining and overseas workers’ remittances, said Luis Vicente León, an economist and pollster. Venezuela’s economy is likely to shrink more than 30% this year from the oil collapse plus the pandemic, says Ecoanalitica, a Caracas business consulting firm.