MIAMI — A Florida magnate with close ties to the Republican Party helped set up the recent meeting between Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro and President Donald Trump’s special envoy, laying the groundwork for a major deal that would allow the Caracas regime to boost its oil sales to the United States in exchange for accepting hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan deportees.

Sources familiar with the negotiations told the Miami Herald that Palm Beach County-based businessman Harry Sargeant III, a major GOP donor who has sought to expand his prior oil and asphalt dealings in Venezuela, worked behind the scenes to facilitate the meeting between Maduro and the envoy, Richard Grenell, a diplomat during Trump’s first term in office.

Their talks led to a deal in which the socialist strongman agreed to accept future flights of Venezuelans deported by the Trump administration — a decision that immediately enraged Venezuelans in South Florida with temporary status who now fear they will be sent back to a nation that has suffered economic collapse under Maduro’s authoritarian rule.

The question that immediately arose for observers after the stunning news last week was whether strings were attached to the deal: What was Maduro promised by the U.S. government in exchange for agreeing to take back Venezuelans deportees?

Although details of the Jan. 31 meeting in Caracas have not been fully disclosed and Trump administration officials claim no quid pro quo was discussed, three sources familiar with the situation said that Maduro’s goal was to leverage his country’s acceptance of the Venezuelan deportees for the partial or complete lifting of U.S. sanctions against Venezuela’s state-owned oil-company, Petróleos de Venezuela, PDVSA. The sanctions, which have severely limited the Venezuelan oil industry’s access to the U.S. market, were imposed by the Trump administration in 2019.

At his meeting with Trump’s envoy, Maduro requested that the U.S. Treasury Department renew a license that will allow Chevron USA to produce oil out of Venezuela for another six months. The license was extended on Feb. 1, the day after the Maduro-Grenell meeting.

“What Maduro won was the automatic renewal of the Chevron license, which Maduro expected that Trump would suspend,” said one of the sources who spoke on condition of anonymity.

“In exchange, Maduro agreed to accept the flights (of Venezuelan deportees) with the hope that his regime would cease to be perceived by Trump as a problem and become a circumstantial solution to one of Trump’s main areas of concern — disarming the ticking time bomb they see in Trump and delaying the risk of Trump moving against them with all guns blazing,” the source added.

Attempts to reach Sargeant through his lawyer, Christopher Kise, were unsuccessful. Kise did not respond to email, text or phone messages seeking a comment from him or Sargeant.

At the forefront

Sargeant has been at the forefront of a group of oil entrepreneurs and bond investors trying to convince Trump of the benefit of the oil-for-migrants deal since he won the election in November. He and others argued that it would be in the best interests of the U.S. to reach an arrangement with the Venezuelan leader that would allow him to stay in power as long as he helped the Trump administration contain the mass migration of millions of Venezuelans.

These efforts, initially reported by the Wall Street Journal in late November, arose from frustrations over the U.S. policy of “maximum pressure,” which included a large menu of national and individual sanctions against the Venezuelan regime and some top officials that were adopted during the first Trump administration. Those sanctions did little to dislodge Maduro from power, so a strategy evolved to use a honey rather than vinegar approach in securing his cooperation in dealing with the migration crisis.

Sargeant, who is based in the Palm Beach town of Gulf Stream, seemed like the ideal candidate to help broker a deal between the regime and the Trump White House, sources said. The Florida energy tycoon has grown close to Maduro over the years. Maduro gave Sargeant the nickname Abuelo, because his physical appearance reminded him of his grandfather.

Since 2017, Sargeant has met with Maduro and other senior Venezuelan officials at PDVSA to discuss oil and asphalt business opportunities, according to published reports and sources familiar with their meetings.

Reuters reported that Sargeant, a former Marine Corps pilot, flew to Caracas in November 2017 to meet with the Venezuelan president in hopes of cutting a deal to buy the country’s heavy crude oil for his new asphalt production company in New Jersey. Sargeant’s pitch paid off the following year, when he inked an oilfield agreement with Maduro’s government.

“We like high-risk places,” Sargeant told Reuters. “There is no doubt they wanted to send a message that Venezuela was open to American business.”

But in January 2019 the agreement suffered a severe blow when the Trump administration imposed sanctions banning Americans from working with PDVSA. It was part of a wider U.S. pressure campaign to topple Maduro’s government.

Sargeant, a former finance chairman of the Florida Republican Party who studied business at Florida State University, built an empire out of his father’s company, Sargeant Marine, in Palm Beach County. His expansion into international deal-making has made him rich but also thrust him into costly disputes that have sullied his reputation.

For example, he was sued by the brother of the king of Jordan, a business partner, who won a $28.8 million judgment for being cut out of a $1.4 billion contract with the U.S. government that allowed Sargeant to transport oil through Jordan to American troops in Iraq. In 2009, a congressman called Sargeant’s deal an “effective monopoly” — his company, International Oil Trading, squeezed out other contractors from bidding on the oil deal — and “the worst form of war profiteering.”

Sargent has had other oil operations running out of Venezuela and his dealings in the country go back to before Trump imposed sanctions on PDVSA during his first administration. According to press reports, one of the deals brokered by Sargeant included a profit-sharing agreement in which his companies would rehabilitate a number of destroyed oil fields in exchange for half their revenues.

His dealings with Venezuela continued during the Biden administration, and they were covered by business news media from time to time. In January 2024, for example, it was reported that Sargeant’s Global Oil Management reached a deal to buy the equivalent of 570,000 barrels of asphalt from PDVSA to be used in infrastructure projects in the United States.

Behind the scenes

Whatever role Sargeant played behind the scenes in coordinating the meeting between Trump’s envoy and Maduro last month, it appeared to pay off.

Chevron’s Treasury license was renewed, an event that was expected to happen automatically unless stopped by the Trump administration. Initially granted by the Biden administration in November 2022, the license has become an important source of income for the Caracas regime. Chevron’s production out of the South American country averages about 220,000 barrels per day, amounting to about a quarter of the country’s current output of 900,000 barrels per day.

Maduro also released six Americans imprisoned in Venezuela in an attempt to let the new administration know that he is willing to work with Trump to improve the relationship between the two nations. So far, the few signs coming out of the White House have been encouraging for the socialist strongman.

“They are doing the right thing in Venezuela,” Trump told reporters this week from the White House.

In what constitutes a shift on how the U.S. government views conditions in Venezuela, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed “notable improvements” in several areas of the country, such as the economy, public health and crime. Her comments were part of a memorandum justifying ending a policy, Temporary Protected Status, that protects many Venezuelans in the U.S. from deportation. The Biden administration had awarded TPS to more than 500,000 Venezuelans because of the dire humanitarian conditions and widespread political persecutions under Maduro’s autocratic regime.

Most experts don’t agree with the Trump administration’s drastically different view that conditions in the country have improved.

More than 7.7 million Venezuelans have abandoned their home country in recent years to escape from economic collapse, violence and political persecution. For many the situation has grown worse, not better, following the July 28 presidential election, which Maduro claims he won, but the United States and other countries believe, based on electoral documents made public by the opposition, he lost by a margin of more than 2-1. Facing widespread accusations of election fraud, the regime lunched an unprecedented wave of violent crackdowns that landed more than 2,000 people in prison, including opposition politicians, human rights activists and journalists.

Although the way forward in the incipient relationship between Maduro and Trump will hinge on the regime complying with its commitments of accepting the deportation flights, sources told the Herald that Maduro hopes to build on this initial engagement to try to achieve more long-term goals.

Maduro is going to want to extract more benefits for accepting all of the deportees, which could quickly add up to hundreds of thousands as a result of the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS as well as a humanitarian parole program that benefits Venezuelans among others. For accepting the deportations, Maduro is likely to ask the U.S. to drop a federal indictment against him on charges of drug trafficking, as well as the $25 million reward offered for information leading to his capture.

In addition to this possible concession, Maduro would also be interested in getting the Trump administration to drop the sanctions on PDVSA that have severely affected the state-run company’s ability to sell oil. The sanctions also closed the U.S. market to Venezuelan oil, until the Biden administration allowed Chevron to ramp up its operations in the South American country.

Sources told the Herald that Chevron’s renewed license is of particular importance to Sargeant, given that it provides the oil he is using for his asphalt business.

Venezuela has a heavy type of crude oil that is optimal for asphalt, which is produced by a joint venture project run by PDVSA and Chevron, said Juan Fernández, a former PDVSA executive director of planning, who now lives in South Florida.

“Chevron has the largest field that produces crude oil for asphalt in Venezuela, the Boscan field,” he said.

Speaking on Bloomberg television this week, Chevron Chairman and CEO Mike Wirth said that his company has been in contact with representatives of the Trump administration, highlighting the importance of the U.S. oil company continuing operations in the South American country.

“We try to inform the government of potential ramifications” a decision to put an end to the license would have, “so they’re well informed before they make changes,” Wirth said.

U.S. Gulf Coast refineries “actually run a lot of the heavy grades that come from Venezuela and if you see the introduction of tariffs to Canadian or Mexican oil,” he said, “it makes sense that that oil would go to other countries, so the Venezuelan oil becomes more important.”

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