Eric McCrady’s company, lacking a verifiable operational history, executed a series of legal changes in Colorado —dissolution, reinstatement, name correction and replacement of registered agent with a powerful law firm— in a swift 32 days after signing the memorandum of understanding with PDVSA, while its CEO received global media coverage that contrasts with the opacity of its corporate structure.
Written by: La Tabla/ Data Journalism Platform. August 21, 2026
On May 1, 2026, Crossover Energy, a registered Colorado company with no known operational presence, signed a memorandum of understanding with the Venezuelan government and its state oil company PDVSA to explore crude oil exploitation in the Orinoco Belt. Nine days later, on May 10, CEO Eric McCrady filed the Articles of Dissolution for one of his two companies registered in Colorado, followed by Articles of Reinstatement that removed its tax delinquency status that had persisted since November 2023 on June 10.
Simultaneously, on May 11, he replaced his own name as the registered agent with the law firm Hall, but Estill, Hardwick, Gable, Golden & Nelson, P.C., a full-service law firm with more than 150 attorneys and offices in six states, where partner Kip Hunter previously served as general counsel for Sundance Energy —the company McCrady bankrupted in 2021 with over $250 million in debts before it was liquidated in 2022—.
On February 27, McCrady had already corrected the name of one of his companies, previously listed as a real estate firm, to align it with his new energy venture. All these maneuvers —dissolution, reinstatement, name correction, and agent change— were executed in just 32 days, in a race against time to present a spotless corporate facade to potential Venezuelan partners.
The push for corporate legitimacy coincided with an unprecedented media blitz. On Tuesday, August 18, in Houston, during the IMAGE conference, McCrady held a press conference to explain that while Hunt Oil was signing contracts with PDVSA that day, Crossover Energy would do so “in the next days or weeks.”
The conference received unusually generous coverage from global media outlets such as Reuters, Bloomberg, CNN Brasil, The Wall Street Journal, and El Universal, amplifying McCrady’s message without delving into the opaque background of his company: a firm without a public website, an unverifiable operational history, and led by a CEO who had already bankrupted an oil company, now aiming to operate in the Orinoco Belt with investment requiring over $20 billion, assisted by Trump’s administration’s National Energy Dominion Council.
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