By Simon Lewis and Daphne Psaledakis
NEW YORK, Sept 23 (Reuters) – US President Donald Trump and Venezuela’s interim President Delcy Rodriguez discussed the restructuring of the South American nation’s billions of dollars in sovereign debt, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday.
The brief meeting at a reception Trump hosted late on Tuesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly came during Rodriguez’s first trip to the US since American forces captured then-President Nicolas Maduro in a January raid.
The talks marked a further step in the rapid improvement in US-Venezuela relations since Maduro’s removal, with Washington backing efforts to reconnect the South American nation to international lenders and support an economic recovery after years of default, sanctions and isolation.
“There’s a lot that needs to be fixed in order for Venezuela to be successful,” Rubio told reporters. “Debt restructuring is key to that.”
Rubio said Venezuela had “probably the world’s largest sovereign debt that has to be restructured” and said Washington wanted to help, but that “it has to be done in the right way.”
Venezuela announced in May it would begin restructuring its external debt, which has been in default since 2017. The sovereign and state oil firm Petroleos de Venezuela together have about $60 billion in defaulted bonds outstanding. Analysts estimate total liabilities, including arbitration awards and accrued interest, could reach between $150 billion to $200 billion.
Venezuela has not published comprehensive debt statistics in years, and US sanctions imposed in 2017 largely cut it off from Western financial markets.
Rubio described the meeting between Trump and Rodriguez as short but important.
Rodriguez arrived in New York on Monday with a delegation that has been holding talks on energy, mining and debt with US officials, multilateral lenders and companies, sources said.
The head of the Inter-American Development Bank has been working to secure approval for a $2.5 billion loan for Venezuela, Reuters reported on Tuesday, but has faced pushback from some members of the lender’s board.
That loan, while dwarfed by Venezuela’s substantial overall debt, would mark a milestone in efforts to restart lending to the country.
(Reporting by Simon Lewis in New York and Katharine Jackson and Daphne Psaledakis in Washington; Writing by Anthony Esposito; Editing by David Ljunggren, Kylie Madry and Sanjeev Miglani)
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