Two Chinese oil supertankers on their way to pick up Venezuelan oil made U-turns and headed back to Asia, reports indicate.
Reuters, citing Monday shipping data from LSEG, details two Chinese tankers were sailing to Venezuela to pick up new oil-for-debt cargoes before they decided to reverse course.
The Venezuelan socialist regime owes billions of dollars to the Chinese communist regime, a debt first accrued during the rule of late socialist dictator Hugo Chávez. At press time, no regime official has publicly disclosed the exact amount owed to China. Bloomberg reported on December that Venezuela’s credit exposure to China is estimated at $59.2 billion since 2005.
The Venezuelan regime has been paying its debt to China with shipments of sanctioned Venezuelan oil, with reports indicating that China has played a key role in helping Venezuela evade U.S. oil sanctions in recent years. In some instances, the China-bound Venezuelan oil has been “rebranded” as “Brazilian crude” to circumvent the sanctions.
Reuters set out Monday the recent return of the two Chinese tankers is a “sign” Venezuela may not be directly exporting oil to China, it’s major buyer, “any time soon.” In December, President Donald Trump ordered a “total and complete” blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela.
Last week, he signed an Executive Order safeguarding Venezuelan oil revenue held in U.S. Treasury accounts from attachment or judicial process, with the aim of “ensuring these funds are preserved to advance U.S. foreign policy objectives.”
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Breitbart News reported last week oil industry analysts are expecting China to replace its oil imports from Venezuela with Iranian crude following the January 3 U.S. law enforcement action that led to the arrest of deposed dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores. Maduro and Flores are presently detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, undergoing trial proceedings on multiple narco-terrorism charges.
The Venezuelan regime, presently led by “acting President” Delcy Rodríguez, recently announced the sale of up to $2 billion in crude oil to the United States. Reuters highlighted last week that the deal would divert supplies from China while helping Venezuela avoid deeper oil production cuts.
“Following the U.S. announcement last week of a deal to export up to 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil stuck in storage, U.S. President Donald Trump said China would not be deprived of Venezuela’s crude. He did not elaborate on the supply mechanism,” Reuters wrote on Monday, adding that China has not received any oil cargo from Venezuela’s state-owned oil company PDVSA since December.
Internal PDVSA documents reviewed by Reuters indicated that China was the first destination of Venezuelan oil last year, with some 642,000 bpd exported — three-quarters of total exports of 847,000 bpd, according to the documentation.
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