Colombian entrepreneurs connected to Gustavo Petro’s friendly circle have hopped onto the oil bandwagon that quietly kicked off two years ago around the Venezuelan energy spoils. Their names stand out for being part of a company favored by the Interim President, Delcy Rodríguez Gómez, who awarded two Productive Participation Contracts (CPP) while still serving as Minister of Oil and before the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuelan territory by U.S. elite forces on January 3rd.
Until last year, Delcy Rodríguez operated under the secrecy of the Anti-Blockade Law to distribute these CPPs almost confidentially, which practically signify a sort of privatization of oil activities in Venezuela by expanding concessions and advantages for private partners, dismantling the “mixed companies” model promoted for years by Hugo Chávez, where the state was always supposed to maintain a majority share of at least 51% of the business.
However, with the rushed reform of the Hydrocarbons Law, approved on January 29 by the National Assembly, the CPPs are now in the open. It took just two parliamentary sessions—led by Delcy Rodríguez’s brother, Jorge—for this modality to be legalized as the new contractual figure to be utilized by Petróleos de Venezuela (Pdvsa). Days earlier, on January 26, Delcy Rodríguez already referred to it as a “successful model” and reported that Venezuela had signed 29 CPPs by that time.
The list of beneficiaries from the CPPs is extensive, featuring individuals closely connected to the nomenclature of the self-proclaimed “Bolivarian Revolution,” as reported by Armando.Info. At the forefront is Harry Sargeant III, the U.S. oil magnate, friend of Donald Trump, who had such a close relationship with Nicolás Maduro that he referred to him as “grandpa,” according to a report by the Wall Street Journal this week. Also benefitting is a select group of Ecuadorian businessmen close to former officials of ex-president Rafael Correa, who also received a CPP, as did companies managed by contractors of the Venezuelan regime like Alex Saab Morán and the Panamanian businessman Ramón Carretero Napolitano, both sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department.
Documents obtained for this investigation between Armando.Info and the independent Colombian media, La Silla Vacía, confirm that Colven Business & Corp, founded by Danilo Romero Gómez, a close friend of Colombia’s president, entered the list of beneficiaries by obtaining two CPPs to exploit and market oil from the Apure and Barinas states, in southwestern Venezuela and near the Colombian Arauca department, whose proven reserves are slightly more than half of those of all of Colombia.
Romero and Petro have been friends for decades. Their connection is such that Romero paid for Petro’s trip to Florence, Italy, to celebrate his victory in the 2022 presidential elections. Romero and his wife are the godparents of Petro’s youngest daughter, and Petro and his wife, in turn, are the godparents of one of Romero’s children.
When Petro took office in Colombia, Romero was considered for ministerial positions; several of his relatives have received posts and state contracts, and amid this proximity to power, he has been implicated in corruption scandals involving the Ecopetrol group, the oil company structured as a corporation in which the Colombian state controls almost 90% of the shares.
Orbiting Power
Colven Business & Corp was registered in Bogotá on October 10, 2022, just two months after Gustavo Petro arrived at the Palacio de Nariño, the seat of the executive power. Danilo Romero was a partner in the company until October 2024, but among the shareholders and directors are still his nephew Diego Martínez Plata and Venezuelan entrepreneur Jesús José Rafael Velásquez Gamero, who was a board member of another company of Romero registered in Colombia named Energies & Fuels.
Additionally, the legal representative of Colven is Hernando Villamizar Pinto, who also appears in Carbones de Toledo and Energy & Fuels (currently in liquidation), owned by Romero.
When asked for this report, Romero recalls that despite these ties, he was an “initial shareholder” and distances himself from the company. “Since April 2024, I made the decision to withdraw from the project (…) As of October 2024, I have had no shareholder relationship nor commercial interest in Colven,” he stated in writing.
But the link between Colven Business & Corp and President Petro extends beyond his close friend. Gregorio Grau Pujadas also participates in Colven as he, along with Martínez Plata and Velásquez Gamero, have rotated as directors of Colenergy Group S.A., a Panamanian company created in May 2024 that has controlled 97% of Colven Business Corp’s shares since August of that year.
Gregorio is the brother of Manuel “Manel” Grau Pujadas, a Catalan entrepreneur who was fast-tracked for citizenship by the Colombian president in November 2022, just three months after taking office. “Manel” was spotted last November in Sweden alongside Verónica Alcocer, Gustavo Petro’s wife, when the Swedish outlet Expressen revealed that Alcocer lives in a luxury apartment in Stockholm, the capital city. In January 2023, he was the one who accompanied the Colombian first lady on an official visit to Venezuela.
Gregorio Grau Pujadas also has business interests in the Dominican Republic alongside Venezuelan Velásquez Gamero. This 48-year-old entrepreneur is a shareholder in at least three companies in Venezuela, according to the National Contractors Registry (RNC). With one of them, Logística & Suministros TJ, he contracted for Pdvsa to provide “catering services for events and acts.” None of his companies responded to emails requesting an interview with Velásquez Gamero.
When asked about his relationship with Velásquez Gamero, Danilo Romero indicated that he knows him as a “jurist” and “expert in corporate structures for hydrocarbon sector projects.”
In contrast, sources linked to the oil business in Venezuela associate Velásquez Gamero with Nicolás Maduro and with Luis Alberto Salas Arguello, a 72-year-old Venezuelan who was key in 2022 for the rapprochement with Maduro when Gustavo Petro was still running for office, as reported by El País. The Spanish newspaper described him as a “businessman of whom there is barely any information on Google.” Though dedicated to business, Salas Arguello has political ties to Maduro, as he worked in the National Assembly until 2006, according to the Venezuelan Institute of Social Security (IVSS). Maduro served as a deputy from 2000 to 2006.
Border Business
On its now inactive website, Colven Business & Corp presented itself as the company that “leads the strategic connection between Colombia and Venezuela.” They also offered mining services and electric power transmission.
However, until last year, when Colven Business & Corp secured the two contracts to exploit and market Venezuelan crude from the oilfields of Apure and Barinas, the company had no noteworthy oil or even business history to document.
To put it bluntly, the financial statements did not reflect the necessary heft for a business of the scale achieved in Venezuela. On the contrary, the company’s numbers were in the red. In 2024, two years after its creation, Colven reported a negative equity of 99 million pesos (around 26,000 dollars at the current exchange rate) and losses of 199 million pesos, equivalent to another 53,000 dollars. These figures are far from what is required to invest in oil fields of any size.
Although the fields that it has permission to exploit in Venezuela are not in the Orinoco Oil Belt, south of the country and home to the largest hydrocarbon reserves on the planet, the deal secured by Colven Business & Corp is highly attractive: Pdvsa estimates that proven oil reserves in the Barinas-Apure basin amount to 1,114 million barrels, just over half of Colombia’s total reserves, estimated at 2,035 million barrels, according to Colombia’s Ministry of Energy and Mines.
Documents from Pdvsa obtained for this report reveal that in December, Colven’s production in Apure reached 5,100 barrels of oil per day, while in Barinas, the figure was 8,100 daily barrels. “In a short time, they could sum up to 50,000 barrels a day and with little investment,” explains a Venezuelan oil businessman who prefers to remain anonymous. He calculates that with an expense between 75 and 100 million dollars, they could double their production by the end of 2025.
Another advantage is that the area to be exploited is also just kilometers away from the oil area of Caño Limón, in Colombian Arauca. “The possibilities in that zone are worth billions of dollars. Should the countries come to an agreement, they would only need to lay 9 kilometers of pipe to connect the hydrocarbons from both nations,” added a Colombian oil businessman informed of that deal.
The primary challenge, the Venezuelan source warned, is the presence of the ELN guerrilla group in that border area. Colven Business & Corp did not respond to the interview request sent via email.
From Colven’s commercial documents, it can be inferred that they always had their eyes on the Venezuelan side of the border. A year after its registration, in November 2023, while Danilo Romero was still a shareholder, they were authorized “to establish branches in Venezuela for the purpose of managing negotiations in furtherance of the company’s social objectives in that country.”
By that time, diplomatic and commercial relations between the two countries had been restored following the break between 2019 and 2022 under former President Iván Duque. One of the first businesses that several Colombian business groups sought was exporting natural gas from Venezuela to Colombia via the Antonio Ricaurte gas pipeline connecting the eastern coast of Lake Maracaibo in Zulia to Punta Ballenas in Colombian Guajira.
Regarding the interest in entering the oil business in Venezuela, Danilo Romero stated that in 2023 “due to the temporary lifting of sanctions” by the United States against Maduro’s regime, they decided to “establish a branch,” but while he had a formal link with the company, “the branch was not implemented, and I do not know what happened since my departure date.”
Gustavo Petro has insisted on the benefits of importing Venezuelan gas, while the Colombian Minister of Energy and Mines, Edwin Palma Egea, has gone a step further by proposing that Colombian companies “participate in the exploration, production, and transportation of crude oil and derivatives” in Venezuela, as he expressed on the social platform X—formerly Twitter—on January 30.
The gradual lifting of financial sanctions against Venezuelan oil promoted by the Trump administration makes what the Colombian minister proposed more feasible. And Colven Business & Corp is already ahead.
Not Forgetting Ecopetrol
From the brief history of Colven Business & Corp, other connections also emerge. Lawyer Alfonso Camilo Barco Muñoz was a minority partner and legal representative between May 2023 and July 2024. On August 8, 2024, he officially resigned and twelve days later was appointed corporate vice president of finance and sustainable value at Ecopetrol.
Ecopetrol is led by Ricardo Roa, who was the manager of Gustavo Petro’s election campaign four years ago and now faces an investigation by the Prosecutor’s Office for irregularities in campaign financing. Danilo Romero, Petro’s compadre, has appeared in accusations of possible corruption in business related to Ecopetrol.
Romero has known Barco since childhood but denied having influenced that appointment at Ecopetrol. For his part, Barco Muñoz explained in writing that he arrived at that executive position after a “competitive process of more than three months, led by an international headhunting firm.”
Regarding his relationship with Romero, he stated that he “is not aware” of the godparent bond with the Colombian president. “What I can say is that I know Mr. Danilo Romero from my childhood, I identify him as a family man and businessman, but I have no current ties or relationship with him.
Barco Muñoz’s tenure at Colven Business & Corp does not appear on the profile of his appointment at Ecopetrol, even though it was his most recent responsibility before joining the Colombian oil company. About this, he explained that “Colven was one of several clients I advised during my time as an independent advisor, being its legal representative does not constitute work experience.”
He insisted that while he was in Colven, the company had not secured CPPs to exploit oil in Venezuela and that there is no “conflict of interest” in his move to Ecopetrol. “All my contractual and commercial relationships were expressly disclosed, including, of course, Colven,” he noted.
In November 2025, a change in the leadership at Colenergy Group SAS, the owner of 97% of Colven Business & Corp’s shares, saw all names connected to Petro’s friendly circle vanish from their posts, but their mark had already been made.
