In what can only be described as the financial industry’s most brazen act of self-dealing since the last crisis, private equity giants are now openly selling assets to themselves at record pace, propping up their crumbling empire with a tactic that reeks of pure Ponzi desperation.

According to the Financial Times, roughly one-fifth of all private equity exits this year involved firms raising fresh cash from new suckers investors to buy portfolio companies from their own aging funds.

That’s a sharp jump from the 12-13% seen in prior years, with Raymond James’ Sunaina Sinha Haldea predicting a staggering $107 billion in these incestuous transactions for 2025, blowing past last year’s $70 billion.

These so-called “continuation vehicles” let PE barons hand money back to restless limited partners in older funds while keeping control of the assets – and, crucially, resetting the clock on lucrative management fees and carried interest.

It’s the ultimate have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too scam: cash out the old money, lock in the new money, and keep milking the same cow indefinitely.

“This year is set to break all records,” Sinha Haldea crowed, calling it a “popular and effective win-win-win liquidity solution” in a market where real exits remain frozen.

Translation: when you can’t find a greater fool outside your own circle, just invent a new fund and pass the hot potato internally.

Jefferies’ Skip Fahrholz chimed in that global volume will hit close to $100 billion, confirming the feeding frenzy.

The FT reports the roster of perpetrators reads like a who’s-who of the buyout racket: PAI Partners flipped part of its stake in ice cream giant Froneri (think Häagen-Dazs) to a continuation vehicle for the second time in a €15 billion-valued deal. Vista Equity, New Mountain Capital, and Inflexion all deployed multibillion-dollar continuation funds to cling to their crown-jewel investments rather than face the harsh light of public markets or genuine third-party buyers.

Even EQT’s CEO Per Franzén, who hasn’t yet dipped into this particular trough, recently admitted he wants in – purely to generate extra fees on existing holdings, naturally.

But beneath the sanitized industry spin lie the glaring conflicts: the same PE firm sits on both sides of the trade, deciding the price at which assets move from one of its pockets to another.

Pension funds and other LPs are rightly furious, fearing managers low-ball valuations to screw departing investors while setting themselves up for fat future carry on the “new” fund.

The Abu Dhabi Investment Council just sued U.S. firm Energy & Minerals Group over exactly this alleged grift: EMG tried to undervalue gas driller Ascent Resources in a self-sale that would have boosted its ownership and restarted fee collection.

The deal collapsed amid the lawsuit, and now outside bidders are circling.

What was once a last-resort lifeboat for dogs nobody wanted has morphed into a preferred tool for hoarding winning assets, all while the broader exit environment remains a graveyard.

Bain & Co’s latest survey found nearly two-thirds of LPs still prefer old-fashioned exits—actual sales to outsiders or IPOs—over this circular money-shuffling charade.

Yet with no real buyers in sight, expect continuation vehicles to become the new normal: a glorified Ponzi mechanism dressed up in GP-LP alignment jargon, keeping the private equity bubble inflated just a little longer – until the music finally stops.

Authored by Michael Gauthier via carscoops.com,

• Chinese EV exports are booming and were up 87% last month.

• Mexico was the top export market in November with 19,344 units.

• Over 600,000 Chinese EVs have been exported to Europe in 2025.

Chinese cars were once the butt of jokes, but they’ve become a major threat to Western automakers. That’s clear today as data from China’s General Administration of Customs has revealed exports of electric vehicles soared 87 percent in November.

That’s a huge increase compared to last year and the most popular destination in November was Mexico. Chinese EV exports to the country soared 2,367 percent to total 19,344 units. While the numbers don’t reveal which vehicles were responsible for the boost, the BYD Dolphin Mini has been a hit south of the border.

The small EV measures just 148.8 inches (3,780 mm) long and features a front-mounted motor developing 74 hp (55 kW / 75 PS) and 100 lb-ft (135 Nm) of torque. Customers can also get 30.1 and 38.8 kWh battery packs, which provide a NEDC range of up to 236 miles (380 km).

Mexico was followed by Indonesia and Thailand as the top markets for Chinese exports last month. The former country imported 17,503 vehicles, while the latter took in 13,517.

Focusing on Europe, exports to the UK soared 113 percent last month to 9,096. This means 121,555 Chinese EVs have arrived since the beginning of the year and this is an increase of 24 percent .

That pales in comparison to Belgium, where 195,309 Chinese EVs have been imported in the first 11 months of the year. However, it’s worth noting this is a 15 percent drop compared to 2024.

Where Most Chinese EVs Are Going

Asia remained the biggest market for Chinese EVs as exports climbed 71 percent to 110,061 units in November. They were followed by Europe and Latin America (including the Caribbean).

While Asian countries have imported nearly 1 million Chinese EVs through November, the big story is Europe’s 604,105. That’s 12 percent more than 2024 and the number shows why European automakers and politicians are so worried.

High income households in America capture a large share of the nation’s earnings, and this gulf has widened over time.

In 2024, the top 20% – with an average household income of $316,100 – took home 52.2% of all national income, up 8.7 percentage points from 1974.

Meanwhile, the bottom 20% received just 3.1%, further shrinking over the period.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld, shows U.S. household income distribution in 2024, based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Trends in U.S. Income Distribution (2024 vs. 1974)

Below, we show how household income is divided across different income brackets:

In 2024, the bottom fifth of U.S. earners averaged $18,460 in household income. While small, their share of total national income has fallen sharply, declining by about 28% since 1974.

Moreover, this group includes workers earning the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, as well as the roughly 760,000 workers who earn below this level. In particular, younger workers make up a large portion of this bracket, with 43% of those earning minimum wage or less being 25 years old or younger.

As we can see, the middle fifth of earners received 13.9% of U.S. household income in 2024, down from 17% in 1974. With an average household income of $84,390, this bracket largely reflects median-wage workers, spanning occupations such as civil engineers, computer programmers, and clinical psychologists.

On the other hand, the top 5% of earners, averaging $560,000 in income has seen it share expand by 6.6 percentage points. Moreover, it is the only income bracket, along with the top 20%, to see its share of national income grow compared to 1974.

To learn more about this topic, check out this graphic on real wage growth by state.

Authored by Francis Menton via the Manhattan Contrarian,

The geniuses who are planning New York’s energy future think that they can make intermittent wind and solar generators work to power the electrical grid by the simple device of providing some battery storage. The idea is that when there is abundant wind and sun, they can store up the power for use during those calm and dark periods in the winter. How much battery storage will that take? It’s a simple arithmetic calculation, but none of our supposed experts have taken the trouble to crunch the numbers.

Nevertheless, without any kind of feasibility study of whether this will work, they soldier forth building large grid-scale battery storage facilities. The battery building program is under way, at least to some degree, and a few such facilities are actually complete and operating out in the rural parts of the state. Meanwhile, there are plans for some much larger such facilities in New York City, including right in some of its most densely-populated sections. Is there any problem with this that we ought to know about?

In a post back in March 2024, I reported on the progress of our two “climate leader” states with developing grid-scale battery storage. It turned out that the big problem was that these facilities were subject to large and dangerous fires on a regular basis. In some cases the same facility would catch fire multiple times. That post reported on major fires in California at a site called Valley Center in San Diego County in September 2023, and at another one called Moss Landing south of San Francisco in September 2022. In January 2025, the Moss Landing facility had another major fire. From the EPA website:

On January 16, 2025, the Moss Landing 300 battery energy storage system at the Moss Landing Vistra power plant (Monterey County, Calif.) caught fire.

• The 300-megawatt system held about 100,000 lithium-ion batteries.

• About 55 percent of the batteries were damaged by the fire.

There were prior fires at the Moss Landing facility in September 2021 and February 2022.

Back here in New York, my March 2024 post reported on no fewer than three major fires at grid battery storage facilities in this state that had taken place during 2023. The following quote came from a piece at Canary Media from August 2023:

New York state is grappling with how to adjust its ambitious buildout of clean energy storage after fires broke out at three separate battery projects between late May and late July [2023]. . . . First, on May 31, a battery that NextEra Energy Resources had installed at a substation in East Hampton caught fire. . . . Then, on June 26, fire alarms went off at two battery units owned and operated by Convergent Energy and Power in Warwick, Orange County; one of those later caught fire. On July 27, a different Convergent battery at a solar farm in Chaumont caught fire and burned for four days straight.

Might you have the idea that these fires are becoming less frequent over time? If so, that’s only because these fires are one of those things — like the Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota — that the liberal media just don’t choose to report. It turns out that the Convergent Energy facility in Warwick, New York had another big fire just last week. From Etica AG, December 22:

Late on the evening of December 19, 2025, a fire occurred at the Church Street Battery Storage Facility in Warwick, New York, operated by Convergent Energy & Power. While no injuries were reported and the fire was confined to a single container, the incident remained active into the following day and prompted a multi-agency response, air quality monitoring, and renewed scrutiny of battery energy storage system (BESS) safety in the community.  For Warwick residents and local leaders, the fire carried added weight. The town has experienced multiple battery storage incidents in recent years, and each new event raises difficult questions about risk, emergency response, and whether existing BESS designs are suitable for locations near homes, schools, and small businesses. 

I can’t find any mention of this battery fire at the New York Times or at major media sites like CNN or the major television networks.

The Convergent Energy Warwick energy storage facility has a capacity of 12 MW and 57 MWh. Meanwhile, back here in New York City, there are plans, well advanced (although not quite yet under construction), to build a much larger grid battery storage facility in Ravenswood, Queens. That would be right on the East River, directly across from East Midtown and the Upper East Side of Manhattan:

You can see on the map how close much of Manhattan is to this facility. To be fair, the wind usually blows the other way, but the parts of Queens near this facility are also very densely populated. Something called Queensbridge Houses — the largest public housing project in the country — is immediately adjacent.

The planned capacity of the battery storage facility in Ravenswood is 316 MW/2528 MWh — some 25 or more times the size of the facility in Warwick that has now caught fire at least twice.

A New York agency going by the name NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Authority) is leading the charge to build these energy storage facilities, including in densely populated areas like Queens. On their website, they have a page touting the new battery storage project at the Ravenswood location. Believe it or not, their sales pitch is that the new battery facility is cleaner and greener than the prior natural gas power plants on the site. Here is a quote they take from Queens Borough President Donovan Richards:

“The days of environmental and economic injustice in Western Queens, especially for our historically marginalized public housing families, are coming to an end. As we prepare to transform the Ravenswood Generating Station into a clean energy producer, it’s critical that the surrounding community reaps the benefits of that transition,” said Borough President Richards.

Somehow, both NYSERDA and Donovan omit to mention the issue of the fires.

President Donald Trump ordered a midnight military raid that captured Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores. U.S. forces pulled off the job without a hitch, hauling in the pair.

“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” Trump announced on Truth Social at 4:21 EST. “This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement. Details to follow.”

Hours later, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the pair had been indicted.

“Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted in the Southern District of New York,” she explained in a post on X. “Nicolas Maduro has been charged with Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States. They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

Bondi then thanked President Trump for “having the courage to demand accountability on behalf of the American People,” as well as a “huge thank you to our brave military who conducted the incredible and highly successful mission to capture these two alleged international narco traffickers.”

While Venezuelans hit the streets in wild celebration, popping bottles and celebrating freedom, Democrats in Washington, D.C., clutched their pearls and went into full meltdown mode, accusing Trump of getting us into a war and violating the Constitution.

“Trump’s unilateral operation last night was an illegal act of war without Congress’s authorization,” Rep. Dan Goldman (D-N.Y.) claimed.

“Maduro is a brutal dictator who has oppressed the Venezuelan people, but our constitution does not yield for bad people. If Congress is to survive as an institution, the Republican majority must join us exercising our power to hold this administration accountable for this flagrant violation of the constitution.”

He wasn’t the only Democrat to claim that Trump acted illegally.

“Without authorization from Congress, and with the vast majority of Americans opposed to military action, Trump just launched an unjustified, illegal strike on Venezuela,” Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) claimed.

“He says we don’t have enough money for healthcare for Americans—but somehow we have unlimited funds for war??”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also chimed in.

“President Trump’s unilateral military action to attack another country and seize Maduro — no matter how terrible a dictator he is — is unconstitutional and threatens to drag the U.S. into further conflicts in the region,” she argued.

“The American people voted for lower costs, not for Trump’s dangerous military adventurism overseas that won’t make the American people safer.”

Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) similarly accused Trump of getting the United States into an “illegal” war.

“This war is illegal, it’s embarrassing that we went from the world cop to the world bully in less than one year,” he said.

But these claims don’t hold water.

“Trump does not need congressional approval for this type of operation,” explains constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley. “Presidents, including Democratic presidents, have launched lethal attacks regularly against individuals. President Barack Obama killed an American citizen under this ‘kill list’ policy. If Obama can vaporize an American citizen without even a criminal charge, Trump can capture a foreign citizen with a pending criminal indictment without prior congressional approval.”

Turley likened the operation to the 1989 capture and prosecution of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega. U.S. courts upheld the “abduction” model and rejected head‑of‑state immunity and extradition‑treaty objections. 

“Legally, Trump has the upper hand in this case. Maduro will replay the arguments from the Noriega case. However, he presents an even weaker case on the merits under the controlling precedent than did Noriega,” Turley explained. 

Authored by Tsvetana Paraskova via OilPrice.com,

Surging liquefied natural gas exports from new North American export plants likely pushed global LNG shipments in 2025 by the most since 2022, Kpler data showed on Tuesday.

The annual rise in 2025 would be the steepest increase in global LNG exports since 2022, when shipments grew by 4.5% compared to 2021, the data showed.

North America was the key supplier of new LNG volumes, as Canada’s first-ever export facility, LNG Canada, started shipments in the middle of 2025, and Plaquemines LNG in Louisiana launched operations and ramped up shipments throughout the year.

Thanks to rising capacity and volumes, the U.S. is set to become the first LNG exporter in the world to have passed in 2025 the threshold of 100 million tons of LNG exports in one year.

Additional LNG supply is poised to hit the market between 2026 and 2030 as more U.S. export plants come online and Qatar begins shipments from its huge capacity expansion of the North Field export facilities.

The U.S. is set to export 14.9 billion cubic feet per day of LNG in 2025, up by 25% from 2024, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) said in its latest Short-Term Energy Outlook (STEO) for December. With new projects ramping up, the EIA expects U.S. LNG exports to jump to an average of 16.3 billion cubic feet per day in 2026.

Despite warnings of a near-term global LNG glut, top exporters in the Middle East, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), see strong demand going forward and flag insufficient investment in supply in the medium to long term.

The UAE is growing its LNG exports to meet surging global demand that will outpace investment in supply, Energy Minister Suhail al Mazrouei told Reuters earlier in December.

“I agree with his excellency, Minister of Qatar, that the demand is going to be much, much more than the projects that we are seeing,” the UAE official added.

Earlier this month, Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi, QatarEnergy’s CEO and the Minister of State for Energy Affairs of Qatar, said that global LNG demand will grow, led by increased power needs from AI-related data centers.

Kyle Hedquist, a convicted murderer who was sentenced to life in prison for shooting a teenage girl to death in cold blood, has been reappointed to serve on Salem, Oregon’s police review board – all in the name of his so-called “perspective” on the criminal justice system.

Hedquist, an Oregon native, was convicted of the aggravated murder of 19-year-old Nikki Thrasher, whom he lured down a remote rural road and shot in the back of the head to prevent her from revealing his involvement in a series of robberies. In 2022, then-Governor Kate Brown (D) played a key role in securing Hedquist’s early release, insisting that the killer “shouldn’t be locked up for life” simply because he was 17 years old at the time he executed Thrasher.

At the time of the commutation, Nikki’s mother, Hollie Thrasher, rightly condemned the decision to free her daughter’s murderer.

“I am upset. I wasn’t even told,” she told KOIN 6. “He took the life of my daughter in cold blood. It was a cold-blooded murder. He planned it.”

The New York Post has the details behind the city’s decision to hire Hedquist:

Defending his reappointment to the board — whose members train with police and take part in ride-alongs — a Salem councillor praised Hedquist for the “perspective” he brings.

Hedquist “brings a perspective that most of us don’t have,” Ward 6 City Councilor Mai Vang said in a video shared on Facebook following the Dec. 8 vote.

“As someone who’s been through the criminal justice system, he understands community safety from a different angle. He’s one voice among nine — he’s not running the show, but his experience matters,” she added.

While certain soft-on-crime ideologues may applaud this bizarre and tone-deaf appointment, law enforcement professionals are understandably appalled.

“To think that we’re providing education on kind of how we do what we do to someone with that criminal history, it just doesn’t seem too smart,” the Salem Police Employees’ Union declared in an interview with KATU2.

Salem Professional Fire Fighters Local 314 has likewise denounced the move.

“As police and fire professionals in the Salem community, we are asking Salem residents to stand with us,” their statement read.

Authored by Bradley Hope and Clara Preve via whalehunting.projectbrazen.com,

Alex Saab may control $60 billion in Bitcoin for the Maduro regime. As Trump’s naval blockade tightens, the real battle is being fought on the blockchain.

Nicolás Maduro is in U.S. custody. In the early hours of Saturday morning, Delta Force operators dragged the Venezuelan president and his wife from their bedroom in Caracas and flew them to the USS Iwo Jima, now steaming toward New York where Maduro will face drug trafficking and weapons charges in federal court.

But as Washington celebrates the most dramatic U.S. military operation in Latin America since the 1989 Panama invasion, a more urgent question is emerging in intelligence circles: Where is the money?

For years, Maduro and his inner circle systematically looted Venezuela—billions in oil revenue, gold reserves, and state assets—and, according to sources with direct knowledge of the operation, converted much of it into cryptocurrency.

The man who allegedly orchestrated that conversion, who built the shadow financial architecture that kept the regime alive under crushing sanctions, is not on that ship.

His name is Alex Saab.

And he may be the only person on Earth who knows how to access what sources estimate could be as much as $60 billion in Bitcoin—a figure that, if verified, would make the Maduro regime’s hidden fortune one of the largest cryptocurrency holdings on the planet, rivaling MicroStrategy and potentially exceeding El Salvador’s entire national reserve.

The claim comes from HUMINT sources and has not been confirmed through blockchain analysis, but the underlying math is provocative.

Venezuela exported 73.2 tons of gold in 2018 alone — roughly $2.7 billion at the time. If even a fraction of that was converted to Bitcoin when prices hovered between $3,000 and $10,000, and held through the 2021 peak of $69,000, the returns would be staggering.

Sources familiar with the operation describe a systematic effort to convert gold proceeds into cryptocurrency through Turkish and Emirati intermediaries, then move the assets through mixers and cold wallets beyond the reach of Western enforcement.

The keys to those wallets, sources say, are held by a small circle of trusted operatives—with Saab at the center.

What Washington didn’t know—and what court documents would later reveal—was that Saab had been a DEA informant since 2016, even as he built Maduro’s shadow financial empire.

Now, with Maduro captured, the question becomes: Will Saab cooperate again? Or will he disappear with the keys to Venezuela’s stolen fortune?

Alex Saab embraces Nicolas Maduro upon his return to Caracas, December 2023. With Maduro now in U.S. custody, Saab may hold the keys to Venezuela’s hidden crypto fortune.

In the official Venezuelan narrative, Alex Nain Saab Morán is a patriot, a diplomat, a martyr of U.S. imperial overreach. In Washington, he is the opposite: a professional sanctions-evader who built a labyrinth of offshore companies that enriched Nicolás Maduro’s inner circle while Venezuela collapsed.

Now he may be something else entirely: among the most valuable people on earth.

But Saab is not the only person who knows where the money went. Whale Hunting has learned that a key figure in the gold-to-crypto pipeline—a man who allegedly served as a physical courier, flying gold bars from Venezuela to Turkey and Dubai—was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury in 2019 but has never been publicly charged.

His name is David Nicolas Rubio Gonzalez. He is the son of Álvaro Pulido, Saab’s longtime business partner. And his story may be the key to understanding what happened to Venezuela’s stolen fortune.

The Courier

On September 17, 2019, the U.S. Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control added David Nicolas Rubio Gonzalez to its sanctions list. The designation identified him as controlling at least three companies: Corporacion ACS Trading S.A.S. in Colombia, Dimaco Technology, S.A. in Panama, and Global de Textiles Andino S.A.S. in Colombia.

His father, Álvaro Pulido, had been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice two months earlier, charged alongside Alex Saab with laundering more than $350 million from fraudulent Venezuelan state contracts. But David was not charged. He was sanctioned—his assets frozen, his ability to do business with Americans severed—but he faced no criminal prosecution.

Why?

According to sources with direct knowledge of the operation, David Rubio Gonzalez was not just a businessman. He was a courier. These sources describe a network that physically moved gold along a route from the Dominican Republic through Venezuela to Turkey and Dubai. Each trip, they say, netted the courier $1 million for his services.

The gold originated in the Arco Minero del Orinoco, a vast mining zone in eastern Venezuela. It was purchased by the state-owned mining company Minerven, processed by CVG Minerven—whose president maintained close ties to Saab—and transported abroad by private aircraft or Turkish Airlines commercial flights. But moving gold at scale requires trusted hands. Someone has to physically carry it, clear customs, deliver it to the refineries and brokers who convert it to cash.

David, sources say, was one of those hands.

Venezuelan gold moved through Turkey, the UAE, and Iran before conversion to cryptocurrency. Couriers like David Rubio Gonzalez allegedly earned $1 million per trip.

The question that haunts investigators is simple: If David was important enough to sanction, why wasn’t he important enough to indict? His father faced eight counts of money laundering. David faced none.

There are only a few explanations. He could be cooperating with U.S. authorities—providing information in exchange for immunity or a reduced role in any future prosecution. He could be under sealed indictment, his charges hidden from public view until the moment of arrest. Or he could have simply slipped through the cracks, a secondary player deemed less important than the principals.

But if our sources are correct about his role as a courier—a man who physically handled the gold that became the regime’s crypto fortune—then David Rubio Gonzalez may know exactly where the money went. And with Maduro captured, that knowledge has never been more valuable.

The Gold-to-Crypto Pipeline

The $60 billion didn’t materialize from thin air. It was built through one of the most audacious financial operations in modern history: the systematic conversion of Venezuela’s gold reserves into untraceable cryptocurrency.

In 2018, as Venezuela’s economic crisis deepened and access to hard currency narrowed, the Maduro regime turned to gold. The country had been exporting gold for years, but now the operation scaled dramatically. Venezuela exported 73.2 tons of gold in 2018 alone—roughly $2.7 billion at the time.

Maduro placed the operation under the supervision of his close ally Tareck El Aissami, whom he appointed Minister of Industries and National Production. Alex Saab emerged as a central facilitator. The gold flowed to Turkey, where it was refined and sold. It flowed to the UAE, where it entered the global market. And in April 2020, tons of Venezuelan gold were flown to Iran on Mahan Air as part of a gold-for-gasoline swap.

Iran International reported that a Lloyd’s Insurance leak revealed the scheme was coordinated by the IRGC Quds Force and Hezbollah. Gold sold in Turkey and the Middle East generated proceeds that funded Hezbollah operations. Some nine tons of Venezuelan gold were exported in a single month, according to Bloomberg. In return, five Iranian oil tankers delivered an estimated 1.5 million barrels of gasoline to Venezuelan ports.

But gold is heavy. It’s traceable. It can be seized. The next step was converting it into something that couldn’t be touched.

Sources describe a systematic effort to convert gold proceeds into Bitcoin through OTC brokers in Turkey and the UAE—brokers who asked few questions and operated outside the traditional banking system. The Bitcoin was then moved through mixers, software that obscures the origin of cryptocurrency transactions, and into cold wallets: offline storage devices that exist beyond the reach of any government or exchange.

The timing was fortuitous. Venezuela began moving gold in earnest in 2018, when Bitcoin traded between $3,000 and $10,000. By the time the price peaked at $69,000 in November 2021, any holdings accumulated in those early years had multiplied by a factor of seven to twenty. If the regime converted even $3 billion in gold proceeds to Bitcoin at an average price of $5,000, those holdings would be worth $40 billion today.

PDVSA headquarters. By December 2025, Venezuela was collecting 80% of its oil revenue in USDT.

The crypto infrastructure didn’t stop with gold. Venezuela’s own PDVSA-Cripto corruption scandal revealed that Saab’s partner Álvaro Pulido—David’s father—used Tether-based settlement systems to divert billions in oil-sale proceeds. Between 2020 and 2022, PDVSA increasingly required intermediaries to settle oil cargos in Tether, routing payments through OTC brokers and private digital wallets.

The scandal revealed ships loaded with more than $20 billion worth of oil departing Venezuelan ports without payment ever reaching PDVSA. By December 2025, Venezuela was collecting 80% of its oil revenue in USDT. Tether has frozen 41 wallets containing $119 million linked to Venezuela—but that represents only what authorities have been able to trace.

The Architect

To understand how this system was built, you have to understand the man who built it.

Alex Saab was born in Barranquilla, Colombia, in 1971. He spent the 1990s running modest textile businesses. His career changed when he partnered with Álvaro Pulido, who was involved in drug trafficking and invited Saab to do business in Venezuela. Colombian left-wing senator Piedad Córdoba—who died in January 2024—introduced Saab to Maduro.

The contracts that followed were staggering in their brazenness. In 2011, Saab agreed to supply parts for 25,000 prefabricated houses under “Gran Mision Vivienda Venezuela.” The contract paid up to four times the actual cost. His company received $159 million to import housing kits but delivered only $3 million worth of products.

In 2016, when the regime launched the CLAP program to distribute subsidized food to families in need, Saab and Pulido built a network to exploit it. They sourced low-quality food from foreign suppliers, assembled the boxes abroad, and shipped them to Venezuela at inflated prices. To move funds and conceal the scheme, they used shell companies in Hong Kong, the UAE, and Turkey. The U.S. Treasury designated these networks in July 2019, calling them a “corruption network stealing from Venezuela’s food program.”

Alex Saab’s network spans shell companies, government officials, and international intermediaries across multiple continents.

Zair Mundaray, a former Venezuelan prosecutor who investigated Saab, told Whale Hunting that Saab slipped into Maduro’s inner circle precisely because he had no loyalties outside it. Unlike other power brokers in Caracas, Saab was not tied to any traditional political families or factions.

“Saab fits the profile of someone with no links to Venezuela’s traditional castes or power groups, whose only real connection is to the presidential family,” Mundaray said. “In Venezuela, power operates much more like a criminal cartel than an institutional structure. That creates a climate of mutual distrust and internal power struggles.”

Saab’s goal was simple: to make money, “and he found the perfect platform in a president who is himself a criminal.”

But Saab became more than a contractor. He became the guarantor of Maduro’s fortune.

“As the public and private spheres ultimately merge, there’s no distinction,” Mundaray said. “Saab is the guarantor of Maduro’s fortune — money dispersed across multiple countries and stored in different convertible assets that ensure him a life of luxury for generations, without ever lifting a finger.”

In April 2018, Maduro made it official, appointing Saab as Special Envoy with “broad powers to carry out actions on behalf of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.” He was no longer a contractor. He was a diplomat.

The Double Agent

Saab was arrested during a refueling stop in Cabo Verde, off the coast of West Africa, en route to Iran.

On June 12, 2020, Saab’s plane touched down on the volcanic island of Sal in Cabo Verde for what should have been a routine refueling stop. He was en route to Iran. Instead, local authorities arrested him at the request of the United States.

The U.S. Department of Justice had unsealed an eight-count indictment charging Saab and Pulido with laundering more than $350 million through U.S. bank accounts. But then came the twist that no one expected.

Court documents reviewed by Whale Hunting revealed that Saab had also cooperated with U.S. law enforcement—providing information on bribe payments made to high-level Venezuelan officials.

Saab entered into a cooperative source agreement with the Drug Enforcement Administration on June 27, 2018—the same year Maduro appointed him Special Envoy. He met with U.S. law enforcement officials in August and September 2016, November 2017, June and July 2018, and April 2019. He also made four payments totaling over $12.5 million to DEA-controlled accounts to disgorge profits from his bribery schemes.

He was building Maduro’s shadow financial empire while simultaneously informing on it.

In December 2023, President Biden negotiated his release in exchange for ten American prisoners held in Venezuela, including one close to our hearts: Leonard “Fat Leonard” Francis (subject of our Fat Leonard podcast, listen here). Saab received a presidential pardon and was required to leave the United States permanently. He landed in Caracas to a hero’s welcome. Maduro embraced him publicly. Within weeks, Saab was appointed Minister of Industry and National Production.

He was once again at the center of Venezuela’s survival architecture. Until this morning.

Who Has the Keys?

Venezuela’s crypto infrastructure may outlast the regime that built it.

With Maduro in custody and facing drug trafficking charges in Manhattan, the question is no longer whether the regime can survive. It’s whether its stolen fortune can be recovered—or whether it will vanish into the blockchain, accessible only to those who hold the keys.

The old sanctions-evasion toolkit—ships, banks, front companies—still exists. But the new one runs on stablecoins, OTC brokers, private digital wallets, and bilateral deals with governments that have no incentive to cooperate with U.S. enforcement.

Sources describe a Swiss lawyer who allegedly controls access to the wallets. The keys may be distributed across multiple people, multiple jurisdictions, multiple layers of security designed to survive exactly this scenario: the capture of the regime’s leader.

David Nicolas Rubio Gonzalez was sanctioned in 2019 but never publicly charged. His father was indicted. He was not. If sources are correct that he served as a courier—physically moving the gold that became the crypto fortune—then he may know exactly where the money went. Is he secretly cooperating with U.S. authorities? Under sealed indictment? Or has he disappeared with knowledge that could unlock billions?

And then there is Saab himself. A man who has already cooperated with the DEA once. A man who was pardoned by one American president and may now be the most valuable intelligence asset for another. A man who, according to a former Venezuelan prosecutor, is “the guarantor of Maduro’s fortune.”

Where is Alex Saab?

Where is David Rubio Gonzalez?

And who has the keys to as much as $60 billion in Bitcoin?

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

It was astoundingly successful and will likely serve to coerce the rest of the hemisphere into strategically capitulating to the US…

The US launched a half-hour-long “special military operation” in Venezuela on Saturday morning that culminated in Delta Force’s capture of President Nicolas Maduro. Several military sites were bombed, US helicopters flew freely over Caracas in a surreal display of the US’ aerial supremacy, and there were reportedly no US casualties. The US’ “special military operation” was therefore an astounding success regardless of one’s personal opinions about its merits. Here are five takeaways from this event:

1. The US’ Grand Strategic Goal Is To Build “Fortress America”

It was assessed here that the National Security Strategy’s prioritization of the Western Hemisphere is all about building “Fortress America”, which refers to the restoration of the US’ hegemony over the Americas in order for it to survive and even thrive if it loses control of the Eastern Hemisphere. It might not happen right away, but the US’ “special military operation” will likely result in it obtaining control over Venezuela’s oil reserves, the world’s largest. That would help make “Fortress America” a reality.

2. Maduro Should Have Taken Trump’s Deal In Hindsight

Trump earlier claimed that Maduro had “offered everything” to the US when asked about a report that the Venezuelan leader agreed to let American companies take control of his country’s resources. The only sticking point appeared to be Maduro’s political fate, with Trump wanting him to go into exile likely at the urging of Marco Rubio (his powerful Secretary of State and National Security Advisor), while Maduro seemingly refused. He should have taken Trump’s deal in hindsight to avoid this humiliating end.

3. The Ayatollah Is Likely Watching Everything Very Closely

Trump recently threatened military action against Iran in support of its latest protest movement, which assembled in response to the country’s deteriorating economy but is suspected of being orchestrated in part by foreign spy agencies in collusion with local agents. The US clearly wants Iran’s complete strategic capitulation after its arguable loss to Israel during last summer’s 12-day war, and if the US doesn’t get what it wants through diplomacy or a Color Revolution, then it might try to capture the Ayatollah too.

4. Adversarial Media Will Likely Try To Discredit Russia

Venezuela has an estimated $20 billion worth of Soviet/Russian arms, including Sukhoi fighter jets and S-300 surface-to-air missiles, yet none were used against the US (possibly due to it buying off top defense officials). Russia and Venezuela also ratified a strategic partnership pact late last year too, but it importantly didn’t contain any mutual defense clauses. Nevertheless, these two factors will likely be exploited by adversarial media to discredit Russia after the US’ “special military operation” in Venezuela.

5. Top Alt-Media Figures Once Again Discredited Themselves

Some top Alt-Media figures lie about the subjects of their geopolitical devotion like when they lied about how the Iranian-led “Resistance Axis” would destroy Israel in a war prior to their defeat at its hands last year. Many of the “usual suspects” did the same with regard to what Venezuela would do if the US attacked it, only to have once again discredited themselves, but Tim Anderson takes the cake after lying that Russia gave Venezuela Oreshniks with the innuendo that they’d be used if it was attacked.

The US’ astoundingly successful “special military operation” in Venezuela is a monumental geopolitical development that’ll likely serve to coerce the rest of the hemisphere into strategically capitulating to it, which could lead to “Fortress America’s” construction at an accelerated pace.

Iran might soon follow Venezuela even if the Ayatollah isn’t captured like Maduro just was.

The common thread between them is that the US has decided to take out its weaker adversaries across the world who refuse to submit to it.