MIAMI — At the center of the Trump administration’s sweeping new oil agreement with Venezuela sits a single businessman whose career has spanned government contracts under Hugo Chávez, years of international financial investigations, and now a leading operational role in one of the largest energy deals the United States has struck with a foreign government in decades.
Who He Is Alejandro Betancourt
Alejandro Betancourt López, 46, was born in Caracas in 1980 to a wealthy family. He holds degrees from Suffolk University in Massachusetts and an MBA from Oxford University in the United Kingdom.
Betancourt leads North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), which he founded in April 2024 and which has grown into Venezuela’s second-largest private oil producer, trailing only Chevron.
NABEP’s roots trace back to 2011, when Betancourt acquired a stake in Petrozamora, a PDVSA joint venture operating mature oil fields in Lake Maracaibo — fields that later became the foundation of NABEP’s current operations.
Estimates of NABEP’s current output vary depending on the source, ranging from roughly 180,000 to 200,000 barrels per day, drawn from operations in Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt.
Beyond his energy holdings, Betancourt leads O’Hara Administration, a Spain-based international investment group, where he serves as president and a principal shareholder of Hawkers, an e-commerce sunglasses company.
How He Built His Fortune
Betancourt’s wealth traces back to the late 2000s, during Venezuela’s acute electricity crisis under President Hugo Chávez. Through Derwick Associates, an engineering firm he co-founded with a cousin, Betancourt secured a series of no-bid government contracts to build thermoelectric power plants — accounts of the total value vary, with some reporting citing at least 11 contracts and others describing 12 contracts worth a combined $5 billion.
According to Venezuelan journalist Alek Boyd, who has tracked Betancourt since 2011, the businessman’s entry into that sector traced to a personal connection: a childhood friendship with Javier Alvarado Pardi, whose father later became president of Electricidad de Caracas and a PDVSA executive.
Boyd said Alvarado introduced Betancourt and his partners to his father during the height of the crisis, assuring him they could solve the country’s power problems despite having no prior experience in the electricity sector.
Betancourt and other young entrepreneurs who built businesses through similar government dealings during this period became known in Venezuela by the slang term “bolichicos” — combining “Bolivarian,” a reference to Chávez’s political movement, with “chico,” meaning boy.
Legal Scrutiny
Betancourt has faced sustained scrutiny from financial and judicial authorities in multiple countries over the past decade. Investigators in the United States, Spain, Switzerland, and Andorra have examined Betancourt and other so-called bolichicos in connection with alleged corruption schemes tied to PDVSA, including a scheme prosecutors say diverted more than $1 billion from the state oil company and laundered the proceeds through Miami real estate and bank accounts in Malta and Switzerland — sometimes referred to in reporting as the “Money Flight” operation, alleged to have moved roughly $1.2 billion out of PDVSA between 2014 and 2018.
In 2018, Abraham Edgardo Ortega, a former PDVSA executive director, pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to a single money laundering conspiracy charge in a related case. Betancourt himself has never been criminally charged in any jurisdiction and has consistently and firmly denied all allegations of wrongdoing.
His legal troubles resurfaced publicly in 2025: British police detained him twice in London, where he had been living, and Spanish authorities separately raided Alamín Castle, a large estate he owned in Toledo province, in an operation reportedly linked to a money-laundering investigation.
According to multiple reports, earlier this year U.S. federal prosecutors in Florida paused their investigation into Betancourt, and the case was later closed on the orders of senior Justice Department officials.
A U.S. official told reporters that most of the legal challenges against him were nearly a decade old and that he currently faces no charges in the United States, characterizing the matter as one that “has been examined extensively by authorities in multiple jurisdictions” without any charges resulting.
Separately, U.S. officials reportedly intervened this year in the Swiss investigation into Betancourt and urged the United Kingdom to lift travel restrictions that had been placed on him, according to U.S. media reports; the Swiss restrictions were subsequently lifted, while a related case before Spain’s High Court remains subject to ongoing jurisdictional appeals.
His Role in the Trump-Venezuela Deal
Following President Trump’s announcement of a deal granting the United States majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of Venezuela’s proven oil reserves, the U.S. government agreed to take a 35% passive stake in Betancourt’s NABEP specifically — positioning him as a central operational link between American energy investors and Venezuela’s existing oil infrastructure.
NABEP has secured long-term development rights under the new bilateral framework, and Betancourt’s growing production capacity in Lake Maracaibo and the Orinoco Belt is being cited by U.S. officials as evidence of the kind of rapid output growth the broader deal is intended to produce.
Sara Chouraqui, NABEP’s general counsel, told Fox Business that Betancourt “has never been charged with a crime in any jurisdiction” and “is dedicated to serving the people of Venezuela by championing the country’s economic revitalization and, when helpful and appropriate, acting as an intermediary between its government and the United States.”
During a July press event, Secretary of State Marco Rubio directly addressed questions about Betancourt’s past legal scrutiny, stating there was “no investigation within our system against him.”
Why He Matters to This Story
Betancourt’s central role in the deal has drawn attention precisely because of the tension between his legal history and his newly elevated position within official U.S. policy toward Venezuela.
Supporters of his involvement point to his demonstrated operational capacity — NABEP’s existing infrastructure, production growth, and years of on-the-ground experience navigating Venezuela’s oil sector under sanctions — as practical advantages for a deal aimed at rapidly scaling Venezuelan output.
Critics, on the other hand, including independent journalists who have tracked his career since the “bolichico” era, point to the unresolved questions underlying years of international investigations and the unusual circumstance of a businessman previously scrutinized over alleged PDVSA-related financial crimes now becoming a formal U.S. government business partner in the same country’s oil sector.
Both realities exist simultaneously: Betancourt has never been convicted or formally charged in any jurisdiction, and the investigations that shadowed him for years have been closed, paused, or remain under appeal, even as the scale and duration of that scrutiny remains a documented part of his public record.
With NABEP’s development rights now formalized under the broader U.S.-Venezuela framework and the U.S. government holding a direct financial stake in the company through its 35% passive position, Betancourt’s role in shaping how quickly and how visibly the deal delivers results is likely to keep his business — and his history — under continued public and journalistic scrutiny in both the United States and Venezuela.
