The New York Times reports:

In early March, as President Trump basked in the success of a military intervention in Venezuela, he joined Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in the West Wing for a private celebration. A businessman also attended, and brought along a pile of gold.

The president looked approvingly at the 10 Venezuelan gold bars stacked in the Roosevelt Room, across from the Oval Office, White House officials recalled. Aides took photos and joked about keeping the gold.

Mr. Trump himself had once blacklisted Venezuelan gold, declaring that it destroyed the environment, poisoned people and financed gangsters and corrupt military officials. But after Mr. Trump toppled the Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, his view changed.

On the same day that the bars arrived at the White House, the Trump administration issued a new policy allowing traders to import Venezuelan gold from one of the world’s most violent and corrupt mining regions. The first supplies would come from a state-owned mining company that remained a designated U.S. national security threat.

“Usually, you have to be in the Olympics to bring back the gold,” Mr. Burgum later said at an energy conference, regaling listeners with the tale of how he had opened Venezuela’s gold pipeline.

The gold trading deal exemplified how Mr. Trump used the capture of Mr. Maduro to gain control of Venezuela’s resources. First, he took charge of Venezuela’s oil exports. Next, his administration turned to Venezuela’s mineral wealth.

That included one of the world’s largest untapped gold reserves at a time when the prices were near record highs and buyers were hungry for it.

The Trump administration and its business allies said that gold sales would benefit the U.S. economy; help develop Venezuela’s mining region; and deprive criminals and corrupt officials of income.

But a New York Times investigation, from the mines of southern Venezuela to the White House to the trading houses of Europe, found that Mr. Trump aligned America with an industry that is still plagued by the very criminality that he said he was fighting by arresting Mr. Maduro.

Planes carried gold out of Venezuela before companies had even visited the mines. Some of that gold, The Times found, is linked to miners who pay gang protection money. That allows criminals to profit from the administration’s signature deal.

And American financiers are investing in a mine tied to gangsters as part of a deal brokered by the Trump administration.

The White House said that progress takes time. “For years, Venezuela’s mining and gold industry has been stolen from the Venezuelan people and has been used to prop up dangerous gangs and support bad actors around the globe,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in a statement. “The United States is helping solve this longstanding problem. We are cleaning up Venezuela’s mining industry. Western companies are improving and legitimizing it.”

To carry out that vision, the Trump administration turned to business leaders eager to profit from the president’s mercantilist worldview.

Among them was Richard Holtum, the chief executive of Trafigura, one of the world’s largest trading houses. Mr. Holtum joined Mr. Trump at the White House to commemorate that first shipment of Venezuelan gold.

He had good reason to celebrate.

It was his company that had persuaded the White House to move on Venezuelan gold in the first place.

Within days of Mr. Maduro’s arrest, Trafigura executives contacted the White House with a bold idea.

The Trump administration had just granted Trafigura the right to sell Venezuelan oil, giving it, according to the company, a broad confidential permit to bypass sanctions. But with skyrocketing gold prices, executives had ambitions beyond oil.

Trafigura executives told the White House that Venezuelan gold was a national security issue, according to people familiar with the proposal. They argued that the White House had an opportunity to wrest control of a lawless industry and put Venezuela’s minerals in the hands of the U.S. government and its partners — namely Trafigura. [Continue reading…]

U.S. Senate Committee on Finance, April 7, 2026:

Senate Finance Committee Ranking Member Ron Wyden, D-Ore. today wrote to Trafigura, a Singapore-based multinational commodities trading company that recently signed a deal to purchase vast quantities of gold from Venezuela for sale and distribution in the United States, demanding answers about what due diligence, if any, the company performed to ensure it was complying with U.S. sanctions prohibiting the sale of gold from mines controlled by terrorist organizations.

“Corruption, environmental degradation, and human rights abuses such as forced labor are rampant within the Venezuelan mining industry, much of which is closely linked to groups designated as foreign terrorist organizations by the U.S. Department of State,” Wyden wrote in his letter to Richard Holtum, Chief Executive Officer of Trafigura Ltd. “Amid recent reports of the first shipment of gold arriving to the United States, I request information to further our understanding of Trafigura’s human rights due diligence and anti-money laundering/counter-terrorist financing compliance in signing this agreement as well as further details about Trafigura’s purported efforts to develop a “responsible gold-sourcing program” in Venezuela.”

Earlier this year it was reported that Trafigura had agreed to purchase up to 1,000 kilograms of gold to be processed and sold in the United States, from the Venezuelan state-owned mining firm, Minerven. In 2019, the U.S. Department of the Treasury formally sanctioned Minerven for operating in a sector used to finance known terrorist organizations and sustain the corrupt regime of Venezuela’s then-President Nicolás Maduro. Minervan has a well-documented history of corruption, human rights abuses, and extensive environmental degradation. [Continue reading…]

BBC News, January 31, 2025:

Switzerland’s highest court has convicted the commodities trading giant Trafigura and one of its senior executives of bribery over payments made by the firm to gain access to Angola’s lucrative oil market.

In a landmark case, the court handed the company’s British former chief operating officer Mike Wainwright, who has also competed as a racing driver, a 32-month jail sentence and fined the company $148m (£119m).

This is the first time an entire company has been charged by Switzerland’s highest court, and bribery convictions of senior staff are rare. [Continue reading…]