As U.S. President Donald Trump moves quickly to put together a $100 billion effort to revive Venezuela's oil industry, the administration has yet to finalize the fate of the crown jewel of the country's foreign assets, U.S. refining company Citgo Petroleum, Reuters reported. Houston-based ​Citgo has been tied up in the lengthy auction of its parent, PDV Holding, organized by a Delaware court to pay billions of dollars to creditors for ‌debt defaults and expropriations in Venezuela.

Nicolás Maduro helped make tether the world’s dominant stablecoin. And with the former Venezuelan leader now sitting in a Brooklyn jail, the cryptocurrency’s central role in his nation’s economy is back in the spotlight, the Wall Street Journal reported. Tether emerged as a vital tool for the state-run oil company to sidestep sanctions, serving as the currency for settling oil transactions. It also has offered a financial lifeline to everyday Venezuelans racked by the tumbling value of their home currency, the bolivar.

Western oil companies have been fighting to recoup tens of billions of dollars that they say Venezuela owes them — debts that could play a prominent role in efforts by President Trump to compel U.S. businesses to produce more oil in the country, the New York Times reported. Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips top the list of oil companies with big financial claims against Venezuela, whose president, Nicolás Maduro, was captured by U.S. forces over the weekend in Caracas.

The Trump administration plans to control future sales of Venezuelan oil and hold the proceeds in U.S. accounts, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said, making the clearest statement yet on Washington’s strategy to bring the impoverished nation’s crude to market and control its most valuable resource, Bloomberg News reported. Wright, who spoke at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. conference in Miami Wednesday, said initially the barrels would come from crude Venezuela is holding in storage, which has been filling up amid the U.S. blockade and threatening to force some production off line.

For activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management, Nicolás Maduro’s swift exit comes at an auspicious time, the Wall Street Journal reported. A U.S. judge in November backed a roughly $6 billion bid by Elliott for Citgo Petroleum, the refining firm owned by Venezuela’s state-run company Petróleos de Venezuela, known as PdVSA, in a forced sale to satisfy creditors. Citgo, based in Houston, owns a U.S. network of refineries, pipelines and terminals that some analysts have said could be worth between $11 billion and $13 billion. The deal was controversial in Venezuela.

White House and State Department officials have told U.S. oil executives in recent weeks that they would need to return to Venezuela quickly and invest significant capital in the country to revive the damaged oil industry if they wanted compensation for assets expropriated by Venezuela two decades ago, Reuters reported. In the 2000s, Venezuela expropriated the assets of some international oil companies that declined to give state-run oil company PDVSA increased operational control, as demanded by late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. U.S.

Venezuela started shutting wells in a region that holds the world’s largest deposits of oil in the face of a blockade by the Trump administration meant to financially squeeze the nation, Bloomberg News reported. Petroleos de Venezuela SA began shuttering wells in the Orinoco Belt on Dec. 28 as the state-run refiner ran out of storage space and inventory swelled. PDVSA aims to reduce Orinoco Belt production by at least 25% to 500,000 barrels a day, the people said. The decrease represents a 15% cut of Venezuela’s overall output of 1.1 million barrels a day.

Elliott Investment Management's affiliate Amber Energy plans to keep Citgo Petroleum's refineries, terminals and other connected assets once it takes over the Venezuela-owned U.S. refiner, following the completion of a court-ordered auction, sources close to the preparations said, Reuters reported. A Delaware court last week approved Amber's $5.9 billion bid for Citgo's parent PDV Holding and ordered the sale of PDV's shares, wrapping up an auction aimed at compensating creditors for debt defaults and expropriations in Venezuela.

A U.S. judge on Saturday authorized the sale of shares in the Venezuela-owned parent of Citgo Petroleum to an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management, following his approval earlier this week of a $5.9 billion bid from the company in a court-organized auction to pay Venezuela-linked creditors, Reuters reported. The sale order is the last major legal step to wrap a two-year auction aimed at paying up to 15 creditors for debt defaults and expropriations in the South American country.

A federal judge endorsed Elliott Investment Management’s roughly $6 billion bid for Venezuela’s shares of Citgo Petroleum, pushing the forced sale of the country’s prized foreign asset closer to completion, WSJ Pro Bankruptcy reported. U.S. District Judge Leonard P. Stark approved a court-appointed special master’s selection of Elliott as the winning bid, saying that although it didn’t have the highest sticker price, it was the best all-around bid and the one most certain to close.