Alejandro Betancourt, the under-investigation billionaire linking Delcy Rodríguez to Trump

A private plane from Palm Beach landed in Caracas on June 27. A Venezuelan businessman under investigation for embezzling billions from state oil company PDVSA disembarked. He was accompanied by his wife, Andreina, and a second man, plus the crew, according to flight records reviewed by EL PAÍS. Their arrival was meant to be discreet, but it was leaked. And it caused a scandal. The protagonist of this story is too well-known in Venezuela to go unnoticed. It was the first of at least two trips shrouded in mystery.

Alejandro Betancourt is one of the young bourgeois who became millionaires thanks to chavismo. The son of a musician and a jewelry designer, he avoided criminal charges at home, although he is being investigated in Spain and Switzerland for money laundering and tax fraud.

The lavish contractor found himself back in the headlines as he returned to Venezuela three days after the two devastating earthquakes that killed more than 6,000 people and jeopardized the country’s recovery. Until then — for a period of almost eight months — Betancourt could only be seen by visiting him at one of his two English mansions, as was prevented from leaving the United Kingdom. He was not forced to wear an electronic ankle monitor, but until very recently he was a wealthy man confined to his homes in Chelsea and Oxfordshire, moving between them by helicopter like an English aristocrat.

Despite the investigations into his dealings, Betancourt has emerged as one of the people with the greatest level of control over Venezuela’s private oil production. Now he comes and goes on private planes, accompanied by his family, partners, investors, and business people from the banking and mining sectors.

Betancourt made a lot of money in Venezuela, until, starting in 2010, his trail began to fade and he resurfaced in Spain, where he got married and acquired extremely expensive properties and companies. There, after spending millions of euros, he got behind the Hawkers eyewear brand — an online sales phenomenon — and built an investment empire ranging from Venezuelan oil to well-known Spanish startups.

Now, six months after Nicolás Maduro’s fall, the businessman is back in Venezuela to advise President Delcy Rodríguez on reviving the country’s oil industry — the same sector that inflated his fortune and that is the subject of investigations against him in Switzerland and Spain. No one has officially confirmed his role, if any, but several sources close to Caracas power circles say his advisory work also covers the mining sector and the debt restructuring the country is carrying out.

But why would Rodríguez, who has presented herself as the cleaner of Maduro-era excesses, trust him with this mission?

Mauricio Claver-Carone, until recently an informal envoy to Venezuela for U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, offered some clues.

Claver-Carone, who had exercised disproportionate power behind the scenes for months, told Reuters that he and other U.S. officials had used Betancourt as an intermediary. The Venezuelan understood the oil business in both countries and could build bridges between the Donald Trump administration and Rodríguez’s government, he said.

The words of the former U.S. special envoy to Latin America show how pending legal proceedings and serious corruption suspicions against Betancourt — and against many other powerful Venezuelans — are irrelevant to Washington. “He’s a U.S. asset and they use him. Betancourt has understood how to sell himself and the Americans are buyers,” a diplomatic source who said they were “surprised” to learn of the businessman’s return to the presidential circle, told EL PAÍS.

The phantom flight

Betancourt left a week after his arrival on June 27 and returned to Venezuela on July 22, according to another flight plan obtained by EL PAÍS. Supposedly he did so on a private aircraft that departed Florida bound for Maiquetía. According to that document, he was accompanied by his wife, his sister, his two children and several Spanish entrepreneurs, friends, and investors in the various businesses Betancourt has backed. The charter listed in the registry departed the United States at 14.42 and landed in Venezuela at 17.30, according to the flight tracker FlightAware, but there is something mysterious about this trip.

Although the document places the aircraft in Venezuela, two of the passengers deny having been there and say that, in that timeframe, the trip they took with Betancourt was from New York to Miami after attending the World Cup final. In addition, the information for that same flight was sent twice with different data and in the second document — same route, same day, same aircraft, same crew — sent while the plane was in flight, there is no trace of Betancourt or his guests.

In their place only Laura Hietamies, a Finnish financier, and her husband, American Jacob Hirshman, co-founder of digital bank Erebor, which serves tech, crypto, and defense companies, appear. Hirshman has traveled to Caracas several times this year to connect the country to the U.S. financial system. Neither responded to EL PAÍS’s messages.

The swapping of names and documents, the complete substitution of one passenger list for another, is, according to a source familiar with the case, a deliberate attempt to disguise Betancourt’s arrival in Venezuela. EL PAÍS sent multiple messages to the businessman, but there was no response. Two of his associates refused to act as intermediaries.

Regardless of whether Betancourt arrived on that July 22 flight, another document shows he left the country again on July 30 bound for a private Miami airport. This time he was accompanied on the aircraft by three men, including Sean Pi and Henry Heeney, co-founders of Heeney Capital, a private investment firm focused on mining and natural resources, the second most-coveted business in Venezuela. In May 2026, Heeney Capital signed advance purchase agreements for mining and gold production projects in the country, as part of an initiative backed by the White House to reactivate that sector. They, too, did not respond to this paper’s queries.

Betancourt continues to gain ground in Venezuela’s oil sector. Harry Sargeant III — a longtime intermediary between Washington and Caracas — sold his minority stake in NABEP, the country’s second-largest private oil company, for $300 million after pressure from the U.S. Treasury to withdraw from the business. The buyer, according to Bloomberg, was a party close to Betancourt, who was already the company’s largest shareholder.

The rising star of the Chávez era

At 46, Betancourt knows the business world very well, especially the oil and electricity sectors — the two most strategic sectors in Venezuela and the ones that have been used most to enrich a select few during nearly three decades of chavismo. He entered the former before turning 30, and his newly founded company, Derwick Associates — despite having no prior experience — was awarded at least 11 contracts without a bidding process, worth some $5 billion, to build thermoelectric plants in the middle of an emergency declared by Hugo Chávez.

According to Transparencia Venezuela, the contracts’ overpricing amounted to around $2.9 billion and several of those plants never operated as promised. Much of the country lives in darkness, without electricity for several hours a day. From that reality came the nickname still used for Betancourt: bolichico, a term coined for young entrepreneurs — many with no prior experience — who were enriched through multibillion-dollar public contracts awarded during the Bolivarian revolution overseen by Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro.

He moved from the power sector to the oil sector, where he remains today, and it is there that the most active case against him weighs: the one the Spanish National High Court reopened in June — after having archived it months earlier — for alleged money laundering and tax fraud. He is accused, along with his partners, of having bribed three officials of the Venezuelan state oil company with $42 million to defraud $4.85 billion in currency exchange operations channeled through oil. That money, Spanish justice seeks to show, ended up spread across companies, investments, and extremely valuable real estate in Spain.

That case stems from an older Swiss investigation into money laundering, which in turn originated from an inquiry in the United States where his alleged accomplices have already been convicted.

Switzerland imposed an extradition order on him from the United Kingdom and confiscated his Italian and Venezuelan passports, until in May of this year the canton of Zurich lifted the restrictions. A diplomatic source suggests that U.S. influence lay behind that decision. Another source close to political actors in Washington confirms it.

In Venezuela, where Delcy Rodríguez herself has denounced the judicial system’s corruption, the cases open against Betancourt never became formal charges.

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