The Trump administration has granted confidential licenses to two of the world’s largest oil traders, Vitol and Trafigura, to broker sales of Venezuelan crude, despite both firms’ recent brushes with bribery prosecutions tied to oil deals elsewhere, The Washington Post reported.

The licenses, awarded in early January, allow the trading houses to buy tens of millions of barrels of Venezuelan oil that had been blocked by U.S. sanctions, and to trade additional crude pumped by Venezuela’s state oil company and other producers while sanctions remain in place, the Post reported. 

The arrangement is part of an energy deal the United States pressed Venezuela to accept after Nicolás Maduro was ousted in a Jan. 3 military raid, the newspaper said. Anti-corruption experts and some lawmakers are now warning that the deal’s secrecy and structure create opportunities for abuse, the Post reported. 

The concerns follow the administration’s decision last year to dismantle the U.S. Justice Department’s unit that prosecuted violators of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the nation’s chief law against the payment of bribes abroad. The dismantled unit previously led separate investigations into Vitol and Trafigura, according to the report. 

Court records cited by the Post show that Vitol and Trafigura have each faced criminal scrutiny over alleged bribery schemes related to oil sales. 

In Vitol’s case, a trader was convicted of bribery in 2024 following allegations that involved code words, shell entities, fake contracts, and invoices tied to state oil companies in Mexico and Ecuador, the Post reported. Vitol previously paid $135 million in criminal penalties to resolve accusations it bribed officials in Mexico, Ecuador and Brazil.

Trafigura admitted in a 2024 federal plea agreement that it plotted with Brazilian oil company officials to route funds through shell companies and offshore accounts to conceal bribes that helped generate $61 million in profits and agreed to fines and forfeitures totaling $126 million, the Post said. 

Trafigura was separately convicted last year in Switzerland on charges tied to bribing an Angolan official for oil contracts, an outcome the company is now appealing. 

“Trump is taking advantage of firms that know how to circumvent regulation,” Robert Bachmann, an analyst at Public Eye, a Swiss nongovernmental organization that investigates commodities traders, told the Post. “They were previously hunted down by the U.S. Department of Justice,” he said, but that “does not seem to matter” now.

Administration officials told the Post that Vitol and Trafigura were selected because they are among the few traders with the networks, tankers, and storage capacity across the Caribbean to move large volumes quickly. Officials also pointed to the traders’ up-front payment of about $500 million and said proceeds have already reached Venezuelan banks to help stabilize the economy and address basic needs, the Post reported.

Taking control of another nation’s oil supply isn’t new for the United States. The U.S. previously facilitated sales of Iraqi oil using foreign bank accounts in the 2000s, and earlier through the United Nations’ oil-for-food program in the 1990s, noted Peter Harrell, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former White House adviser in trade and economics who spoke to the newspaper. 

“There is also precedent for corruption scandals popping up around these schemes,” he said in the report. 

Such concerns prompted five Democratic senators last month to send letters to 15 U.S. banks seeking information on whether the Trump administration had approached the institutions to help sell seized Venezuelan oil in global markets.

Read more at The Washington Post