The President of the US, Donald Trump, announced on March 24, 2025, that a 25% tariff is going to be imposed on any nation that buys oil and gas from Venezuela starting April 2. The secondary tariff on Nicolas Maduro’s regime in Venezuela happens to be a response to the nation that in a way is deceitfully sending innumerable criminals and murderers as well as gang members to the US, said the president.
Trump posted on his social media handle that any country that buys oil and/or gas from Venezuela is going to be forced to pay a 25% Tariff to the US on any kind of trade they do in the country.
This move is going to cut off India’s access to the Venezuelan oil & gas and is going to impact the nation’s crude inflows on a minimal basis given that the nation has accounted for just .92% of all inbound crude shipments in terms of value as per the figures coming from the commerce department.
It is well to be noted that Venezuelan oil & gas comprised $1.01 billion of the total $109 billions of crude that was imported in FY25’s first nine months.
But the country did become the 12th largest source when it came to crude within that period, which was up from 16th largest in FY24, when it happened to send $802 million of crude. At present, only Reliance Industries Ltd.- RIL officially happens to import Venezuelan Crude. In July 2024, RIL got the clearance officially from the US authorities to import oil from Venezuela. Although while the public sector refiners wait for a similar kind of a sanctions waiver from the US so as to be allowed to buy Venezuelan oil & gas, they had started to make second-order transactions in order to source it from companies that already got the waiver, said the sources from the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas in September 2024.
Though the government has thus far remained aloof from directly buying crude oil from a country that has been hit by sanctions, the purchase of cargos through a third party is allowed. Notably, sporadic imports of oil from Venezuela first started in December 2023 after a long wait. In 2024, most of the months saw Venezuelan oil & gas reach Indian shores.
As a matter of fact, the US had gone on to impose sanctions on Venezuela’s oil sector in 2018 after Nicolas Maduro came back into power. These sanctions were later eased in October 2023. However, they were reimposed in April 2024. But the US State Department went on to make an exception for the US companies that operated in Venezuela.
On March 24, 2025, President Trump put light on the fact that Venezuela has been pretty hostile to the US as well as the freedom it upholds.
