(Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com) President Donald Trump has said that he is “inclined” to keep ExxonMobil out of his plans to plunder Venezuela’s vast oil resources after the CEO of the oil company suggested the country was “uninvestible.”
Exxon CEO Darren Woods made the comments on Friday, when President Trump hosted a group of oil executives to discuss his plans for Venezuela. Before the meeting, Trump claimed that oil companies were ready to invest more than $100 billion rebuilding Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, but he received no commitments.
“We have a very long history in Venezuela. In fact, we first got into Venezuela back in the 1940s. We’ve had our assets seized twice,” Woods said at the meeting, referring to the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil industry in 1976 and the further nationalization of oil projects by Hugo Chavez in the early 2000s.
“So you can imagine, to reenter a third time would require some pretty significant changes from what we’ve historically seen here and what is the current state. If we look at the legal and commercial constructs and frameworks in place today in Venezuela, it’s uninvestable, and so significant changes have to be made,” Woods added.
The Exxon CEO did add that he was “confident” those changes could be put in place by the Trump administration working with the Venezuelan government, but the president was still unhappy with his remarks.
“I didn’t like Exxon’s response,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday night. “I’ll probably be inclined to keep Exxon out. I didn’t like their response. They’re playing too cute.”
The one US oil company that said it’s ready to act is Chevron, the only US oil firm that continues to operate in Venezuela through joint ventures with the state oil company, PDVSA.
“We have a path forward here very shortly to be able to increase our liftings from those joint ventures 100% essentially effective immediately,” Chevron Vice Chairman Mark Nelson told Trump at the White House. “We are also able to increase our production within our own disciplined investment schemes by about 50% just in the next 18 to 24 months.”
Trump has insisted that the Venezuelan government will cooperate with his plan following the US attack on Caracas that killed 80 to 100 people and resulted in the abduction of President Nicolas Maduro, though it remains unclear if Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodriguez, will agree to all of his demands.
This article originally appeared at Antiwar.com.
