President Trump is trying to kick-start private investment in Venezuela while maintaining considerable control over the country and the companies that are allowed to do business there.
Those goals have conflicted in the weeks since U.S. forces removed Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president. For investors, a big obstacle is that the United States has not yet lifted economic sanctions on Venezuela.
According to an analysis of Treasury Department data, the country is subject to more than 400 restrictions, some of which bar companies from working with the state-owned oil company and members of the Venezuelan government.
The measures are so broad that it has been difficult for those interested in producing oil and gas in Venezuela, for example, to even gather the technical data they would need to evaluate opportunities. One executive who attended a meeting at the White House this month expressed concern that requesting such information from Venezuela’s state oil company might violate sanctions.
So far, any company hoping to do business in Venezuela has been required to seek exemptions, known as licenses, from the U.S. Treasury Department.
Processing those requests can be time consuming, and licenses may last only a few months or years. Licenses need to be regularly renewed, and can be yanked at any time. That uncertainty is especially concerning for oil investments that could take decades to pay out, said Dawson Law, a former Treasury Department official and founder of Conseil Global Advisors, a geopolitical risk and compliance advisory firm.
Since Mr. Maduro was captured almost three weeks ago, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said the administration would ease restrictions on the country’s oil sales. The U.S. government has already enlisted two big commodity traders to help facilitate those sales.
But trading oil is very different from producing it, and all of the sweeping restrictions that the United States began enacting over a decade ago remain in place.
In 2015, President Barack Obama targeted high-level individuals in Venezuela accused of human rights abuses by imposing sanctions on them. During Mr. Trump’s first term, the Treasury Department ramped up pressure by issuing sweeping restrictions on the oil and financial sectors.
The sanctions were designed to hurt the country’s economy in order to force the Maduro regime to end its human rights abuses and antidemocratic actions. The campaign crushed the Venezuelan economy and led to a humanitarian crisis.
Last year, in an escalation, the Trump administration declared the Cartel de los Soles a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” organization. In the announcement, the Treasury Department claimed the drug cartel was headed by Mr. Maduro and other high-ranking officials, and that it provided support to Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang, and Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel.
The terrorist designation poses greater legal risk for companies than more common types of sanctions. Historically applied to groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and ISIS, the designation allows prosecutors to treat even indirect dealings as criminal support for terrorism, risking prison sentences rather than fines and compliance settlements.
A March 2025 memo from the law firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom states that “knowingly conducting or facilitating a transaction on behalf of a designated cartel (including through willful blindness or deliberate indifference) may give rise to criminal liability,” not just financial penalties.
Lafarge, a French cement company, and a subsidiary had to pay the United States $778 million in fines in 2022 after pleading guilty to paying Syrian terrorist groups in 2013 and 2014 to operate a plant there.
Kodiak Gas Services, a Texas company, disclosed in a securities filing in November that an internal investigation found its Mexican subsidiary had likely made payments to people associated with a cartel designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
In the filing, Kodiak said it had reported the potential violation to the U.S. government and warned investors that the matter could expose the company to criminal or civil action by the authorities, including fines and requirements to change its compliance programs.
Kodiak did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
A Treasury spokeswoman said that the department was “fully committed to supporting President Trump’s efforts on behalf of the American and Venezuelan people.”
“Typically when you have a heavily sanctioned jurisdiction, you see overcompliance from large multinational corporations because they don’t want to get close to the line,” said Emily Kilcrease, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
For companies, she added, that could mean staying far away from high-risk markets like Venezuela.
Elsewhere, even when sanctions have been lifted and a hostile government has fallen, the kind of quick investment Mr. Trump is seeking has rarely followed. After the collapse of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s government last year, the United States eased sanctions on the country, but investors remained cautious.
“People still didn’t rush in to do business,” said Daniel Tannebaum, a former Treasury official who now leads anti-financial crime efforts at Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm. Given Mr. Trump’s compressed time frame, “there is no track record of success in what they’re attempting to do here,” he said.
Rebecca F. Elliott covers energy for The Times.
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