Where is Venezuela’s oil money?

0:28This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. plus diet and exercise. On Rho, I've gone from struggling to run a mile to running farther every day. You can access FDA-approved GLP-1s online. Get the support you need to reach your weight loss goals. Go to roe.co slash weight to see if you qualify. I'm a paid Rho partner. 20 % average weight loss in one year in non-diabetics with obesity or overweight with a weight-related medical condition versus 3.1 % in placebo arm. Rx only. To stay informed about serious side effects, go to roe.co slash safety. Since January, the United States government has sold roughly 13 billion dollars of Venezuelan oil, and there's an official government ledger online in Caracas that tracks what Venezuela received for it.

1:10I've had a quick look through it and I'm pleased to report that it's a very easy read. It contains just one entry, a single transfer of 300 million dollars recorded back in March. For a country sitting on the largest proven crude reserves on the planet, that's what accountants would describe as a light quarter. The$13 billion figure comes from analysis by the Financial Times, which leaves a$12.7 billion discrepancy between the oil that left and the money that arrived. Now, I'm sure that there's a perfectly good explanation and that it's all in a spreadsheet somewhere. When the US removed Nicolas Maduro in January and installed his vice president, Delcy Rodriguez as interim leader, President Trump said the United States was stepping in to get the oil flowing and that the revenues would be held in a custodial capacity.

2:08The State Department later added that financial monitoring was underway and that billions of dollars had been dispersed to the Venezuelan economy. Those billions are proving difficult to locate. Francisco Rodriguez, a Venezuelan economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, pointed out to the FT that despite a 25 % surge in crude exports this year, Venezuela's first quarter GDP grew by just 2.5%, its weakest performance in nearly five years. So the oil is definitely leaving, it's just the money coming back that seems a bit shy. This is all happening at a terrible time for the country.

2:53Last month Venezuela was hit by twin earthquakes of magnitude 7.2 and 7.5. Thousands of people were killed, tens of thousands were left homeless, and the damage to property and infrastructure has been estimated at$37 billion, close to a third of the entire economy. Now to be fair to the White House, there are good reasons why you might want to hold Venezuela's oil revenues in a safe account rather than handing them over on a wooden pallet. To understand why, you have to think of Venezuela as a corporate bankruptcy that happens to have a flag and a seat at the UN. Years of mismanagement, corruption and enthusiastic expropriation under Hugo Chavez and Nicolas Maduro have left the country owing somewhere between$150 and$170 billion to a large and deeply unamused group of creditors.

3:52Wall Street bondholders, foreign governments and a long line of companies whose refineries and gold mines were seized without anybody offering to pay for them. Now, in a normal corporate bankruptcy, a court steps in and freezes all of the claims so that the business can be unwound in an orderly fashion. Without that shield, the moment the company tried to deposit a cheque, its creditors would be in court trying to grab it. Countries don't get bankruptcy courts. There's no judge who can tell a hundred creditors to form an orderly queue. So, if Venezuelan oil were sold on the open market through ordinary commercial banks, dozens of judgment holders would be in federal court grabbing at the proceeds.

4:39Every tanker leaving port and every dollar sent back to buy spare parts would be seized long before it reached Caracas. The solution was Executive Order 14373, issued on January 9th, which used emergency powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEPA, to grant legal immunity to Venezuelan oil revenues held in US Treasury accounts. On paper, a legal safehouse. The money is protected from creditors so that it can be used to rebuild the country's collapsed energy sector. The difficulty with a legal safe house is that it only works if everybody trusts the person holding the key.

5:23A bankruptcy trustee has to publish audited financial statements every quarter, so that creditors and the public can see that nobody is dipping into the till. Six months in, the White House has published almost nothing. The quarterly audits promised from KPMG have not appeared, which has led lawmakers from both parties to ask why Congress is being kept in the dark. And it only gets stranger. When the administration arranged its first sale of Venezuelan crude for$500 million, the money didn't go into a US Treasury account at all. It went into an offshore bank account in Qatar. Which is not where I would have put it, but then again, I've never had to hide half a billion dollars from anyone.

6:11The reason involves American victims of terrorism and a legal trap that Executive Order 14373 could do nothing.

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7:15To understand how the White House ended up running Venezuelan crude sales through a bank in Doha, you have to look at the testimony Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January. Rubio described routing the first 500 million dollars through Qatar as a short-term fix to a short-term problem. And there was a real problem. Pedevesa, Venezuela's state oil company, was running out of places to store the oil. Tankers were sitting offshore full of extra heavy crude with nowhere to unload, and if the oil didn't move the oil wells would have to be shut down, which risks permanent damage to the wells.

7:59So, the US administration brought in Vital and Trafigura to sell the stockpile, with the proceeds landing in an account in Qatar National Bank under US supervision. So, why a Qatari bank account? Well, as Scott Anderson and Alex Zerdin pointed out in an analysis for Lawfare, there were two legal problems associated with putting that money into an American bank account, and they're both good ones. Ordinarily, when a president uses IEPA to freeze foreign assets, those assets are protected from court judgments. That's how the Bush administration held Iraqi oil revenues after 2003, when the country was being rebuilt.

8:44But in 2002, Congress passed Section 201 of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, or TRIA, which is what lawyers call a notwithstanding provision. The statute opens by saying that notwithstanding any other provision of law, anyone holding an unsatisfied court judgment against a terrorist party can seize that party's blocked assets in the United States, including, and this is the part that matters, the blocked assets of any agency or instrumentality of that party. A notwithstanding provision is Congress writing a law and adding in advance that it beats whatever else you were about to cite. It's the legislative equivalent of I don't want to hear it.

9:32Venezuela has a big problem with that clause. U.S. prosecutors have repeatedly accused the Maduro regime of assisting designated foreign terrorist organizations, the Columbia guerrilla groups FARC and ELN, and criminal outfits like Trenda Aguera. The 2nd and 11 circuits have read agency or instrumentality very broadly, holding that it can cover an entity that merely materially assisted a terrorist party or played a significant role in its activities. District courts have taken that standard and applied it to Pedevesa, allowing people holding judgments against FARC to go after a Venezuelan oil company's frozen assets.

10:18So, the state oil company of Venezuela is, for the purposes of this particular statute, a subsidiary of a Colombian guerrilla movement. Corporate structures can be complicated. These judgments run to hundreds of millions of dollars. If that first$500 million had touched a bank in New York or a US Treasury account, lawyers for the terrorism victims would have been filing attachment orders long before the wire even cleared. The money would have gone straight into litigation and none of it would have reached Caracas. By routing it through Doha, the US government put it beyond the physical reach of an American court.

11:00The second problem is even better, and that's because the White House created it itself. It turns out that the person in Venezuela that the U.S. government talks to on the phone is not necessarily the person the U.S. courts think is in charge. In Caracas, the administration deals directly with interim president Delce Rodriguez. Inside the federal court system, official recognition policy has been sitting undisturbed since 2019, when Donald Trump recognized opposition leader Juan Guardo. As far as the courts are concerned, the opposition-led 2015 National Assembly is still the only body entitled to control Venezuelan state property in America.

11:48So, the executive branch is negotiating with one Venezuelan government, while the judicial branch holds the assets for a different one. The United States is disagreeing with itself about who runs Venezuela. AIIPA lets the president freeze assets to stop them from moving. It doesn't let him take ownership of them and hand money to someone else. That's a wartime power, and this isn't war. Freezing is a lock on the door, it isn't a deed. So, if the administration had put$500 million into a US account and then wired it to Delcy Rodriguez, representatives of the 2015 National Assembly could have walked into court and argued that the executive branch was giving away their money.

12:37And they'd have had a point. Qatar has no such difficulty. Qatar never recognized Juan Guardo or the 2015 National Assembly. Qatar recognizes whoever is in the presidential palace, which is a foreign policy with the great advantage of never needing to be updated. And the Treasury already knew this trick. In September 2023, as part of the deal that freed five American detainees in Iran, the Biden administration authorized the transfer of$6 billion of frozen Iranian oil revenues out of South Korea and into accounts at Qatari banks, supervised by the Qatar Central Bank. Iran never got the cash, the money could only be released to approved vendors for humanitarian goods under US oversight, and when Washington wanted the arrangement stopped after October 7th, Qatar stopped it.

13:38So, faced with a sudden mountain of unsold crude and a courthouse full of people holding writs, Doha was the easy answer. The difficulty is that moving cash offshore only works for cash. It does nothing for the kind of asset that can't be moved. Which brings us to Citgo. If you've driven past a filling station anywhere in the United States, you've seen the red triangle. Citgo runs about 4 ,000 stations along with pipelines, storage terminals and three large refineries in Louisiana, Texas and Illinois that between them process over 800 ,000 barrels of crude a day. The facility in Louisiana, on its own, is the seventh largest refinery in the United States.

14:26Citgo is a 113-year-old American company that has been owned by Venezuela's state oil company since 1990. It was the most valuable thing Venezuela owned outside Venezuela, and the Gulf Coast refineries had been specifically re-engineered to handle Venezuelan crude, which is heavy sour and generally unwelcome elsewhere. The assumption in Caracas had always been that whatever happened at home, Sitco was untouchable, which brings us to the single most expensive lesson in corporate formalities ever administered. The reason a creditor normally can't touch a subsidiary that's a corporation is that a corporation is a separate legal person from its owner.

15:15Your creditors can come after you, they can't come after your company, and they can't come after your company's company. This is the entire point of the corporate form, and it's very hard to overcome. Courts do occasionally set it aside, piercing the corporate veil, but it is rare and it is treated as an extraordinary remedy for extraordinary facts. Delaware courts pierce the veil in a low single-digit percentage of the cases where somebody asks. You do not get there by being badly run or insolvent or unpleasant, you get there by demonstrating over a period of years that the separation was never real in the first place.

15:59Which Venezuela did repeatedly, publicly and on the record. For two decades the government in Caracas ran PDVSA as a cash register with a corporate charter attached. When the state needed money for social programs or political favors or to cover sovereign debts, it told PDVSA to wire the money, and PDVSA did. The president of Venezuela appointed the company's president, its directors, its vice presidents, and its shareholder council. Employees were fired for political reasons. The government committed the company to selling oil to allies at large discounts and handed out mining rights without asking the company first.

16:44None of this caused any difficulty inside Venezuela, but it caused a great deal of difficulty in Delaware. In 2016, a Canadian mining company called Crystal X won an arbitration award of$1.2 billion against Venezuela after Hugo Chavez nationalized its Las Cristinas gold operation in 2011 without paying for it. Venezuela declined to pay the award on the grounds that it didn't want to, so Crystal X registered the judgment in Delaware and went after Pedevesa's shares in PDV Holding, the company that owned Citco. The argument was that Pedevesa was the alter ego of the Republic of Venezuela and that its American assets were therefore available to satisfy Venezuela's debts.

17:36Now, when the defendant is a sovereign state, the courts don't use ordinary veil piercing. They use a 1983 Supreme Court case called Banqueque, which says that a state-owned company is presumed separate from the state unless the state exercises such extensive control that the company is really its agent. And Crystal X had been careful. They didn't ask the court to declare that Pedevesa was liable for all of Venezuela's debts. They asked for something much narrower, a finding that these particular shares, though they had Pedevesa's name on them, were really Venezuela's property. Modest, constrained, nothing to worry about.

18:20The Third Circuit then affirmed it in language that wasn't narrow at all, and later courts have read it as settling the general question. Chris Lex asked for the door to be cracked open and the appeals court removed the door entirely. The alter ego ruling worked on Venezuela's creditors the way a dinner bell works, a queue formed in Delaware, bondholders and expropriation claimants, including ConocoPhillips, Gold Reserve, OI Glass and Tidewater on a first-come, first-served basis. Judge Stark appointed a special master to run a forced auction of PDV holding and pay them out of the proceeds. At which point, Venezuelan politics produced its one moment of national unity.

19:10The Maduro government and the Democratic opposition, who agree on essentially nothing, both denounced the auction. The arrangement they were objecting to works like this. PDV holding is controlled by the opposition. Pedevesa on the ground is controlled by Maduro. And the opposition represents Pedevesa in American courts because the United States doesn't recognize Maduro. The company was defending itself in court on behalf of a government that considers its own lawyers traitors. Everyone involved objected to the sale. Nobody could agree who owned the thing being sold. The auction took eight years and was not what you'd call orderly.

19:55Amber Energy, an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management, a hedge fund that has spent 40 years buying claims nobody else wants and then somehow collecting on them, won the first round in 2024 with a conditional bid of just over$7 billion, which the creditors rejected as too low. The process restarted. Gold Reserve bidding through a vehicle called Dalinar Energy came in at$7.4 billion and then raised itself to nearly$8. Amber won last November with a bid of$5.89 billion in cash, structured alongside settlement with the 2020 bondholders. Judge Stark approved it last November, writing that it offered the best combination of price and certainty of closing that anyone had submitted.

20:49Certainty of closing being the operative phrase, the highest number on the table lost to the number most likely to survive contact with the appeals court. Gold Reserve responded by asking for the removal of both Judge Stark and the special master, citing alleged conflicts, including their financial advisors. That motion was denied. Elliott, it should be said, is experienced at this. This is the fund that spent 15 years pursuing Argentina over defaulted bonds, and in 2012 seized an Argentine naval vessel. The vessel was a three-masted sailing ship on a goodwill tour with cadets aboard. Elliott's subsidiary had it detained in Ghana over a debt of just under 300 million dollars.

21:40It stayed there for 10 weeks. Argentina eventually got it back through the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. The same campaign involved going after the presidential aircraft, the assets of the Argentine space agency, and the money Argentina was owed for its stand at the Frankfurt Book Fair. So, when a hedge fund with that record turns up at a distressed auction, the outcome is fairly predictable. Elliott gets a large refining network at a price the sellers dispute. Some of the creditors get paid and Venezuela is left with nothing. The deal still needs a license from OFAC, the treasury office that administers US sanctions, before it can close.

22:26The Financial Times has noted that Paul Singer, who runs Elliott, was an early financial backer of Marco Rubio's political career. Rubio is at the State Department and does not sign OFAC licenses, so make of that what you will. So, the oil money is offshore and the refinery now belongs to a hedge fund, which brings us to Threadneedle Street. Underneath the Bank of England, there are 31 tons of Venezuelan gold. It's been there since 2008, for the same reason that a lot of developing countries keep gold in London. The Bank of England runs one of the world's largest vaults and offers custody services to central banks, and London is a sensible place to store bullion you might one day want to sell.

23:16That was the theory. In 2018, the banks stopped taking Venezuelan calls. This gold Gold makes up about 15 % of Venezuela's foreign currency reserves. UK court documents valued it at around$2 billion in 2020, and since gold has done rather well it is now worth somewhere north of$4 billion. So Venezuela has, in the last 7 years, made a great deal of money on this position and has been entirely unable to do anything about it. Now, to explain how the gold got stuck, I need to explain a rule of English law called the One Voice Principle. English courts do not decide who the president of a foreign country is.

24:02They're not equipped for it, and they don't want the job. Instead, when the question comes up, the court writes to the foreign office and asks. Whatever the foreign office comes back with, the court treats as conclusive. The judiciary and the executive must speak with one voice on foreign affairs, so the court simply adopts the government's answer and gets on with the case. It's an elegant solution to a hard problem, and it works beautifully right up until the Foreign Office changes its mind. In February 2019, the then Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt issued a statement recognising Juan Guaido as the constitutional interim president of Venezuela.

24:48Guaido, armed with a piece of paper from the British government, appointed his own board to the Central Bank of Venezuela. That board wrote to the Bank of England, instructing it not to release the gold to Maduro. Guaido told the Financial Times in May 2020 that Britain would be financing torture by handing it over. At more or less the same time, Maduro's board of the same central bank sued the Bank of England to force it to hand the gold over, proposing that the proceeds go through the UN development programme to buy medicine and food during the pandemic. So, the English courts were presented with one central bank, two boards, both claiming to be the real one, issuing directly contradictory instructions about the same pile of metal.

25:37Both of them, it should be said, were correct, depending entirely on which government you asked. The case went to the UK Supreme Court, which handed down its judgment in December 2021. Lord Lloyd-Jones held that the one-voice principle bound the courts to accept the Foreign Office's statement. Guaido was the constitutional interim president, and Maduro was not the president for any purpose. Now that reads like a win for the opposition, and it was reported as won. What Guaido had actually won was the right to stop anybody else from touching the gold. He couldn't get it out himself either. There were sanctions and further litigation, and the act of state questions went back down to the commercial court to be argued about some more.

26:27The practical outcome of the highest court in Britain, ruling in his favor, was that the bars stayed exactly where they were. And then, in December 2022, Venezuela's opposition-led National Assembly voted to abolish Guaido's interim government, meaning that he was no longer the interim president of anything, and the British government stopped recognizing him. Maduro's lawyers were back in court more or less immediately, making what looked like an unanswerable argument. The UK doesn't recognize Guaido anymore. His central bank board was his appointment, so the appointment is void and the gold goes to Caracas.

27:09In June 2023, the Court of Appeal in Deutsche Bank versus Central Bank of Venezuela said no. Withdrawing recognition operates forward, not backward. Guaido was the recognized president at the moment he made the appointments, so the appointments were valid acts of a foreign state when made, and an English court cannot go back and unmake them. So, today's position is this. The courts can't take instructions from Maduro's board because the government didn't recognize Maduro. They can't take instructions from Guaido's board either because Guaido no longer holds the office he was recognized as holding.

27:51The board that has authority over the gold was appointed by a president who no longer exists on behalf of a government that was dissolved by its own parliament. The gold is in the custody of a bank that is willing to release it to whomever is entitled to it, and there is nobody left who is entitled to it. Last month after the earthquake's interim president Delcio Rodriguez wrote to King Charles asking him to release the reserves, saying that the gold belongs to Venezuelan people and is needed to deal with the consequences of the disaster. I should explain that the king cannot do this, he can't overturn the Court of Appeal, he can't instruct the Bank of England, and the last monarch who tried telling English judges what to do was Charles I, whose disagreement with parliament ended with the removal of his head.

28:45The king's real functions are opening parliament, signing bills that have already passed, and receiving visiting heads of state. The letter will have been read, acknowledged, and forwarded to the Foreign Office, which sits on King Charles Street, named after a different King Charles, and the address where this actually gets decided. Buckingham Palace has not publicly responded. The British government's position is also on the record. Speaking as Foreign Secretary earlier this year, Yvette Cooper told MPs that the government would continue not to recognize the leadership in Caracas and acknowledged that this would likely mean the bank continues to withhold the reserves.

29:31She said it was important to keep pressure in place for a transition to democracy, reflecting the will of the Venezuelan people. Whether that position holds is now an open question. There's a new government in London as of this week, and Ed Miliband has inherited the file. Since the gold is stuck on a question of recognition, and recognition is a decision for the Foreign Office rather than the courts, a change of mind there would do more for Venezuela than any amount of litigation. There has been some parliamentary pushback. The Labour MP Richard Bergen filed an early day motion at the end of June, calling for the immediate release of the gold.

30:14An early day motion is a formal parliamentary mechanism by which a member of parliament may register an opinion, and it has no other effect whatsoever. His has 30 signatures, but there are 650 MPs. Meanwhile, the UN's emergency appeal, the immediate one, for shelter, water and medical care rather than reconstruction is looking for$296 million to cover 1.3 million people for six months. It has raised$300 million against a funding gap of$627 million. Rebuilding is a separate question and a much larger number. The UN Office for Disaster risk reduction puts the direct physical damage at$37 billion,$24 billion in buildings, $13 billion in infrastructure and that figure doesn't yet include the cost of reconstruction, so it will rise.

31:16The gold under Threadneedle Street is worth about$4 billion and it's appreciated by more than$2 billion while the argument about who owns it has been going on. So, while lawyers in Delaware and London argue about who's entitled to sell or store Venezuela's assets, Venezuela is dealing with what it's like to live in a country whose state has stopped working. After the earthquakes, the gaps became difficult to miss. The US military is currently running air traffic control at the main international airport in Caracas and helping to operate the coastal ports, because otherwise the relief supplies wouldn't get in.

31:57This produces some awkward photographs. American diplomats and military commanders have been pictured touring disaster sites alongside Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela's interior minister who controls the state security forces and the armed groups used against political opponents. Cabello was charged in a New York federal indictment in 2020 with conspiracy to commit narco-terrorism and conspiracy to import cocaine. The State Department is currently offering up to$25 million for information leading to his arrest or conviction, and he's the last remaining fugitive from that indictment. So, the United States is simultaneously offering$25 million for this man and standing next to him at a press conference.

32:49Diplomacy, it seems, requires flexibility. But if I was one of those diplomats, I'd be tempted to grab him. Interim President Delcy Ramos.

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33:52Visit simplisafe.com slash licenses for alarm license information. Rodriguez has had a harder time. At her one appearance at a disaster site, she was heckled by survivors telling her to leave. She later held a press conference explaining that reports of a chaotic government response were false and had been manufactured by, in her phrase, media laboratories. President Trump has been more supportive. He has called Rodriguez a terrific person doing a great job and told reporters that apart from the earthquake damage, it's a happy country again. The actual response has been large. something like 30 ,000 first responders and more than 3 ,000 foreign rescuers deployed, along with 137 search and rescue dogs from more than 20 countries.

34:44The best known of them is a border collie named Tsunami, adopted from a shelter in Caracas nine years ago, who worked at the Turkey-Syria earthquakes in 2023 and has located 26 survivors in this one. He is retiring after this deployment. The American contribution has been substantial. US officials leading the effort say that they have spent around$310 million, diverted over a million pounds of relief supplies, and donated 10 refrigerated containers to help store the dead. The Atlantic notes that this still lags well behind what the United States spent after comparable disasters in the region, including the Haitian earthquake of 2010.

35:30Tom Fletcher, who runs the UN relief effort, says another$300 million is needed to reach more than a million people requiring life-saving support. Meanwhile, the opposition, the people who would have to form the elected government that could actually unlock any of these assets, has not been having a good time either. Maria Carino Mercado was barred from standing in the 2024 election, spent much of the following year in hiding and won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for her work promoting democratic rights and for unifying the opposition behind the demand for free elections. When she attempted to return to Venezuela via Curacao after the earthquakes to help coordinate relief, her charter aircraft was turned around in mid-air after Dutch authorities were told her return was not American policy.

36:26Axios reported that senior US administration officials described her attempt to return as grotesque political opportunism. So, the Nobel laureate can't get into the country and the man with the 25 million dollar reward on him is helping direct the relief effort. Which brings us to the part that doesn't resolve. There is a serious argument for not handing billions of dollars in oil revenue and gold to the current government in Caracas. It is largely the same political class that presided over a 75 percent contraction of the economy, expropriated foreign businesses and ran the state oil company so far into the ground that a Delaware judge eventually ruled that it was indistinguishable from the state itself.

37:15Handing that group billions of dollars and asking them to spend it wisely would be optimistic. The alternative, currently in operation, is that a foreign government takes control of the oil exports, the refineries and the gold, and holds the proceeds in accounts nobody can audit while the country deals with$37 billion of earthquake damage. Both of these are bad options. The US State Department's position is that this is custodial. The money belongs to Venezuela, disbursements are monitored, and the arrangement exists for the benefit of the Venezuelan people. President Trump has described it quite differently.

37:58The Financial Times reports that speaking in June about the January operation, he said that it took 48 minutes to win that war, that the US had brought millions of barrels of oil out, that the operation had paid for itself 28 times over, and that the US is making a lot of money too. Both of these things are being said about the same$13 billion. When the State Department is describing a monitored humanitarian trust, and the President is on television describing a profitable investment, you can see why members of Congress from both parties have started asking for the accounts. And that's the through line in all of these stories.

38:42Venezuela's oil money is in Doha because American courts might grab it. Its refinery was sold at auction in Delaware because a court decided the government and its oil company were the same legal person. Its gold is trapped in London because no English court can work out who is authorized to ask for it. None of those things happened because anyone doubted the assets belonged to Venezuela. They happened because sovereign wealth held abroad only stays yours for as long as other people's institutions agree that there's somebody legitimate to give it back to. When that stops being clear, ownership turns into a question and questions get answered by judges, custodians and creditors, none of whom are Venezuelan and all of whom are following rules that make perfect sense individually.

39:35An internationally recognized elected government is not just the nice democratic outcome for Venezuela. At this point, it's the only mechanism that exists for getting the accounts unfrozen, stopping the auctions and putting anyone in a room who can sign for the money. So that's where we are. $13 billion of oil that nobody can account for, a refinery sold to a hedge fund, 31 tons of gold that is appreciated by$2 billion while sitting in a vault that no one can open, and a country trying to clear rubble. Thanks for tuning into this week's podcast. The podcast is entirely supported by viewers like you on Patreon, where you can contribute as little as you feel like to keep this whole thing going.

40:23If you'd like to support it, I'll leave a link in the show notes. Have a great week and talk to you again soon. Bye.

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