What to make of President Nicolas Maduro’s incremental moves to extract his country’s oil & gas industry from the conundrum in which it finds itself is not an easy matter on which to make a definitive determination. On the one hand there have been reports that Caracas may have been displaying signs of urgency in untangling his country’s critical oil industry from the conundrum of a protracted effort, initiated by the Donald Trump administration in the US and extended by Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, to ensure that as long as President Maduro who the US has accused of fraudulent elections and political repression remains in office, the embargo, buttressed by sanctions against companies the cooperate with Venezuela to break it, remains in place.
