Over the past year, the U.S. has imposed increasingly restrictive sanctions on Venezuela’s finances and debt issuance as Nicolas Maduro continues to tighten his grip over the collapsing Venezuelan state. Yet, despite expectations that the U.S. would slap direct sanctions on Venezuela’s oil industry, Washington appears reluctant to go any further. The word out of Washington is that the United States is no longer looking at sanctioning Venezuela’s oil industry, and not just because Venezuelan oil accounts for a large part of the imports of the refiners on the Gulf Coast. The U.S. Administration doesn’t want to be responsible for the total collapse of Venezuela, and doesn’t want to be blamed for contributing to it, analysts told Platts’s Brian Scheid . “If you break it, you buy it,” George David Banks, a former international energy and environment adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, told Platts. “The White House doesn’t […]