Access is the asset in today’s Venezuela, and the premium goes to the intermediary, not the State.
By Elio Ohep, Petroleumworld-EnergiesNet
SAN DIEGO, CA
Petroleumworld.com/EnergiesNet.com 10 13 2026
Venezuela today looks like a big piñata. Everyone is lining up with a stick, swinging to see what falls out. And few have swung harder, or faster, than Jaime Gilinski.
According to Bloomberg, the richest man in Colombia is about to turn a contract for a Venezuelan oil field that cost him practically nothing into a stake valued at US$515 million in GeoPark, a Latin American oil producer he is now set to control. No upfront investment, no barrels produced, no wells drilled. Just access.
The mechanics are simple and worth looking at closely. After U.S. forces removed Nicolás Maduro in January and Washington eased sanctions, Gilinski moved quickly. He secured the OFAC license needed to do business in Venezuela, with his son Gabriel traveling to Washington to request it. Gabriel met with interim president Delcy Rodríguez in March and traveled to Caracas more than ten times in the following months. Last month, Gilinski signed a 25-year contract with the Venezuelan government to operate the Bare heavy oil field in the Orinoco Belt, next to one of Chevron’s prolific blocks. Hours later, he agreed to transfer that contract to GeoPark in exchange for new shares, initially valued at US$515 million, which would make him the company’s majority shareholder. GeoPark says it took part in the negotiations with PDVSA and has held 5% of Bare from the start; it is buying the other 95% from Gilinski.
Under the deal, GeoPark will fund the investment in Bare and keep a 65% working interest. PDVSA keeps the rest. On September 4, Gilinski appeared next to Rodríguez in a televised address from Caracas announcing the agreement and thanking her for her trust.
He is not alone at the party. Pacific Coast Energy, from California, has begun operating two heavy oil blocks, according to Bloomberg. Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam has signed his own deals. Alejandro Betancourt, a businessman with influence during the Maduro years, is consolidating his position. Chevron and Repsol never left. ExxonMobil and TotalEnergies were at a crowded oil and gas conference in Caracas recently, but being in the room is not the same as investing. They want to be part of the conversation and stay up to date. That conference, the Venezuela International Oil and Gas Summit, drew some 650 executives, officials and diplomats from more than 250 companies, and its US$2,950 passes sold out, according to Petroleummag. Exxon called Venezuela uninvestable in January, and it has not reversed what it said. In this new Venezuela, access is the asset.
This is where the story gets uncomfortable for those of us who remember the first round of the Apertura in the 1990s. Evanan Romero, who has been in the industry since the nationalization of the oil industry and later served as an executive at Maraven, put it plainly. A deal like Gilinski’s, he wrote, would have been impossible in that first round. Those situations were strictly prohibited. Why? In his words, borrowing from Sherlock Holmes, it was elementary: otherwise the round would immediately have become a place to fatten and slaughter cattle for quick profit.
The rules were not there by accident. They were designed to make sure that whoever received an area was the one who would put up the capital, bring the technical capacity and take the risk. Not someone who would collect a fee for opening the door and walk away.
Today those rules are missing, and the question nobody seems to ask is who gets the money. Look at who wins. Gilinski gets US$515 million in GeoPark shares and control of the company. GeoPark gets a field next to Chevron’s with a 25-year contract. And Venezuela, the owner of the oil, gets nothing from the transfer. The State handed over the field, and when it changed hands a few hours later at half a billion dollars, not a dollar of that went to the Venezuelan treasury. PDVSA keeps the same 35% it had before the transfer. The whole premium stays with the intermediary.
Other industry experts who have followed the deal see it the same way. As one of them put it, it is a shame for a nation when its contracts make people richer before a single barrel is produced, because that makes it hard to respect the owner of the resource. Ricardo Hausmann has made the same point from Harvard, arguing that much of the wealth from Venezuela’s new oil deals is going to private dealmakers and politically connected insiders on both sides, not to ordinary Venezuelans. Gilinski’s deal is that argument with a price tag attached.
And we know this much largely because GeoPark is a publicly traded company and had to disclose the details to regulators. Bloomberg itself notes that other oil deals in Venezuela are far less transparent. We do not know how many other contracts are being handed out the same way.
There is a deeper problem, one these pages have been pointing out since January. As we wrote then, a hydrocarbons law passed by a body without democratic legitimacy is open to challenge and reversal, and constitutional scholar Allan Brewer-Carías has long held that acts issued by authorities without constitutional standing can be annulled once a legitimate order is restored. Since then the knot has only gotten tighter. Article 150 of the Constitution requires National Assembly approval for contracts of national public interest signed with, or transferred to, foreign states or companies not domiciled in Venezuela, but the Assembly governing alongside Delcy Rodríguez is not the one Washington recognizes; that is still the one elected in 2015. The reform of the Hydrocarbons Law was published without the review by the Constitutional Chamber that Article 203 requires for organic laws. And Rodríguez’s own interim presidency rests on a contested reading of Article 233; former Supreme Court justice Blanca Rosa Mármol de León has said the oil deal with Washington is void because it was signed by a usurper. None of these questions has been resolved by any competent authority.
Washington has tried to cover that gap by wiring itself into the deals, with Treasury licenses, U.S. law and U.S. courts, so that a future Venezuelan government tearing them up would be crossing the United States, not just a company. As we explained in August, that raises the cost of reneging. It does not remove the problem. House Democrats have already warned that informal assurances from this administration may not be recognized by the next one, and none of that scaffolding fixes who in Venezuela had the authority to sign.
Bare sits on top of that same pile. A contract signed with a government of questionable legitimacy is only as strong as the next government’s willingness to honor it, and if Venezuela recovers full democracy, nothing guarantees that a legitimately elected Assembly will validate what was signed without its approval. As we said in August, without real democratic mechanisms these deals are not worth half a cent split in two.
This is also where Gilinski’s deal fits the pattern we described in September, of operators who get paid as soon as the crude is sold, leaving the legal risk behind. Gilinski does not even need the crude. He collects his GeoPark shares when the deal closes. If a court later voids the Bare contract, Gilinski loses a paper gain on something that cost him almost nothing. GeoPark’s other shareholders, diluted to pay for it, lose real value, and Venezuela, as always, carries the legal bill.
Romero sees the same bill coming. He says this Round 2.0 has fundamental flaws in its genes, and that it will become a giant headache later, when the same companies start accusing Venezuela of violating their sacred property rights. Today, he says, when we point this out, they ignore us. Tomorrow they will accuse us. And he leaves a question on the table: why do you think Exxon and Conoco won their claims after spending 15 to 18 years in arbitration courts?
That leaves the country in a trap. If these contracts are honored, Venezuela pays for deals it never truly agreed to. If they are thrown out, the companies will go to arbitration, and the country pays again. Exxon and ConocoPhillips won their claims because they had the tools to take Venezuela to international tribunals: arbitration clauses in their Apertura contracts and the protection of an investment treaty. Contracts signed in a rush, without clear rules and without democratic legitimacy, are the arbitration awards of tomorrow.
Meanwhile, the ground reality is far from guaranteed. GeoPark has up to 120 days to meet the contract’s conditions, a deadline that ends in December. If the Bare contract expires before then, the transaction with GeoPark is terminated. The company wants to raise Bare’s output from 11,000 barrels a day to 95,000, but CEO Felipe Bayón said it is still negotiating with PDVSA for access to the diluent needed to move that asphalt-like crude. The Orinoco Belt is not an easy place to make money, and a financial deal does not produce oil by itself. The veterans at the Caracas summit said as much. Two power outages left the hotel ballroom in the dark for a few seconds, despite a generator at the entrance, and the shortage of electricity was one of the obstacles mentioned most. César Álvarez, of Maurel & Prom, admitted they were too optimistic when they got their license, because they could not raise production without goods and services companies. Ludwing Mercado, of Repsol, warned that recovering production without recovering the electrical system will lead to failure, as reported by El País and Petroleum magazine.
So the piñata keeps swinging. Some will grab the candy, some will grab nothing, and the stick keeps moving from hand to hand. But someone always pays for the candy. In Venezuela’s case, it may be the country itself, in an arbitration court, years from now.
Sources:
Bloomberg (Mie Dahl and Marcelo Rochabrun, October 9, 2026), Evanan Romero, El País (Florantonia Singer), Petroleummag, IA Research, EnergiesNet-Petroleumworld previous coverage.
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Elio Ohep, editor@petroleumworld.com
EnergiesNet.com 10 12 2026
