US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that additional US sanctions on Venezuela could be lifted as soon as next week to facilitate oil sales, and that he will also meet next week with the heads of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on their re-engagement with Venezuela.
Bessent said in an interview yesterday with Reuters that almost $5 billion worth of Venezuela’s currently frozen IMF Special Drawing Rights monetary assets could be deployed to help rebuild the country’s economy.
“We’re de-sanctioning the oil that’s going to be sold,” Bessent said during a visit to a Winnebago Industries engineering facility. The Treasury was examining changes that would facilitate the repatriation of sale proceeds of the oil stored largely on ships back to Venezuela.
“How can we help that get back into Venezuela, to run the government, run the security services and get it to the Venezuelan people” he said of the Treasury’s sanctions analysis.
Asked when more sanctions could be removed from Venezuela, Bessent said, “It could be as soon as next week,” but did not identify which ones.
The moves are part of the Trump administration’s effort to stabilise Venezuela and encourage the return of US oil producers to the country a week after US forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro in Caracas and brought him to New York to face drug trafficking charges.
US sanctions have banned international banks and other creditors from engaging with the Venezuelan government without a licence. The institutions have cited this as an impediment to a complex $150bn debt restructuring widely viewed as a key to the return of private capital to Venezuela.
On Friday evening, President Donald Trump signed an executive order blocking courts or creditors from impounding Venezuelan oil revenue held in US Treasury accounts, declaring that these funds should be safeguarded to help Venezuela create “peace, prosperity and stability”.
Bessent, who controls the dominant US shareholding in the IMF and World Bank, said that the two institutions had already reached out to him about Venezuela.
He said that the US Treasury would be willing to convert Venezuela’s IMF Special Drawing Rights held at the Fund to dollars for use in rebuilding Venezuela.
Venezuela currently has about 3.59bn SDRs, which are worth about $4.9bn at current exchange rate, but it cannot currently access them. SDRs are made up of dollars, euros, yen, sterling and Chinese yuan.
The Treasury last year agreed to back a $20bn swap line for Argentina partly with that South American country’s SDRs in an effort to stabilise the peso and help Argentine President Javier Milei’s party win in parliamentary elections.
An IMF spokesperson said that the Fund was closely monitoring developments in Venezuela and declined comment on Bessent’s mention of a meeting next week.
The IMF has not engaged with Venezuela for more than two decades, with the last formal IMF assessment of Venezuela’s economy completed in 2004. Venezuela paid off its last World Bank loan in 2007, when Maduro’s predecessor, the late Hugo Chavez declared that Venezuela “will no longer have to go to Washington” for funding.
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