Gold worth hundreds of millions of dollars shipped from Venezuela to the United States is sitting in storage because refiners refuse to process it, an investigation has found.

The New York Times reported that major refiners will not handle the metal because they cannot certify its provenance as clean. Without that certification, the gold cannot enter legitimate markets or be sold onward.

The shipments date back to earlier seizures and sanctions-era stockpiles. JCK, the jewellery trade publication, noted that refiners face strict anti-money-laundering rules and fear legal exposure from handling Venezuelan-origin gold.

The US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control has issued general licences covering certain Venezuelan transactions, but those do not resolve the provenance problem for refiners.

For now, the gold remains in vaults — an asset on paper that cannot be turned into cash. The situation shows how sanctions enforcement has shifted from blocking shipments to blocking the financial plumbing that makes commodities tradeable.