The Pentagon Now Owns Part of an Oil Company Run by a Man Under Money-Laundering Investigation in Three Countries.

The Pentagon does not, as a rule, own equity stakes in oil companies. This week, the White House confirmed it now does — 35% of the corporate parent of a private Venezuelan oil venture, acquired through a structure that required no meaningful upfront capital from the US government at all.

The Defense Department's Office of Strategic Capital — an obscure Pentagon office not typically associated with oil markets — is taking its 35% stake in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP) through what are known as penny warrants, giving Washington real equity ownership without a significant cash outlay. On top of the equity, the Pentagon secured preferential rights to buy up to 20% of the company's future oil production at cost, not market price.

Venezuela's interim authorities granted NABEP, headquartered in Barbados, hundred-year concessions to 17 oil fields holding roughly 65 billion barrels of proven reserves — about 20% of Venezuela's total. If the White House's own figures hold up, that reserve base alone would make NABEP the second-largest oil company in the world by proved reserves, trailing only Saudi Aramco. NABEP has committed to $100 billion in new oil infrastructure investment, and projected tax and royalty payments to Venezuela's government are estimated to exceed $209 billion over the agreement's first 25 years.

NABEP's owner, Alejandro Betancourt, has faced money-laundering investigations in the United States, Spain, and Switzerland over the past decade, all tied to Venezuela's state oil company. None of those investigations have been reported as resulting in charges against him, but they mean the US government's own defense department is now a minority equity partner in a venture controlled by someone who has spent years under multi-country financial scrutiny.

Analysts describe the arrangement as an unusual instance of the administration effectively practicing state capitalism in the energy sector — the federal government taking a direct ownership position in a specific company's commercial upside, rather than simply regulating or taxing the industry from the outside.