The United States isn’t done grabbing oil tankers off Venezuela—but let’s get one thing straight: these aren’t Venezuelan ships flying the tricolor and heading for friendly ports.
According to Reuters, Washington plans to keep seizing tankers tied to a shadow fleet moving Venezuelan crude to China, using Iranian operators, shell companies, and flags of convenience to dodge U.S. sanctions. The Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security have been planning these moves for months, treating it less like trade enforcement and more like dismantling a criminal supply chain.
The latest seizure made that clear.
Earlier this week, U.S. authorities took control of a tanker carrying roughly 1.1 million barrels of sanctioned Venezuelan oil. The ship was Iranian-owned or controlled, sailing under a foreign flag, a familiar play straight out of Tehran’s sanctions-evasion handbook. Same tricks Iran has used for years: paper companies, borrowed flags, switched-off transponders, and plausible deniability.
Caracas predictably cried foul, calling the seizure “robbery.” But this wasn’t a Venezuelan merchant ship minding its own business. It was a floating cutout—part of a shared Iran–Venezuela shadow network designed to move black-market oil and turn it into hard currency.
Asked whether more seizures are coming, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt declined to preview future operations but left little doubt about the direction of travel.
“We’re not going to stand by and watch sanctioned vessels sail the seas with black market oil,” she said, arguing the proceeds fuel narco-terrorism and prop up rogue regimes.
Translation: if you’re hauling dirty oil under a fake flag, don’t expect the Navy to wave as you pass.
Treasury backed that up on Thursday, slapping sanctions on six supertankers suspected of playing the same game. Four—including the H. Constance and Lattafa—are registered in Panama. The others fly flags from the Cook Islands and Hong Kong. Different registries, same shell game.
According to Treasury, these ships rely on deceptive and unsafe shipping practices to funnel cash back to Nicolás Maduro’s narco-state—often with Iranian middlemen handling the logistics and China waiting at the other end with a checkbook.
Venezuela’s state oil company, PDVSA, hasn’t commented. No denial. No clarification. Just silence.
And in this line of work, silence usually means the network knows it’s being hunted.