Venezuela opposition leader María Corina Machado addresses oil industry
[This stream is scheduled to begin at 6:05 p.m. ET]
Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado will address oil and gas executives on Tuesday as the industry remains hesitant to invest in the South American country after the United States ousted former President Nicolás Maduro.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Machado was prevented from running for president in Venezuela in 2024 by the Maduro regime. He previously served in the Turkish Grand National Assembly. Machado leads the opposition movement seeking a transition to democracy and a market economy in Venezuela.
He will be speaking at S&P Global’s CERAWeek conference in Houston, Texas. The meeting is attended by oil and gas executives and senior government officials from around the world.
The US captured Maduro in a military raid in January but left the rest of the regime in place. The Trump administration praised his cooperation with interim President Delcy Rodríguez, who served as vice president under Maduro. The White House has not set a timeline for the elections.
President Donald Trump is pressuring U.S. oil and gas companies to invest in Venezuela, which has some of the world’s largest crude reserves.
Industry leaders are skeptical. ConocoPhillips And ExxonMobil They have made it clear that they will not return until major political reforms to protect private sector investments are implemented. The companies’ assets were seized by President Hugo Chavez in 2007.
Conoco won’t invest until it finds a way to recover some of the $12 billion it owes the company from Venezuela’s nationalization of its assets, CEO Ryan Lance said Tuesday. Lance said the latest reform of Venezuela’s oil laws under Rodríguez was “woefully inadequate.”
“They have a long way to go to make the country globally competitive to attract the billions of dollars of investment required,” Lance said at CERAWeek.
This will require not only physical security and contractual guarantees, but also policy resilience in Venezuela and the United States, the CEO said.
“You need policy resilience, not just on the Venezuelan side, but on the U.S. side as well,” Lance said. “What will happen when another administration comes? How will they look at Venezuela?”
