(Bloomberg) -- Venezuela would allow foreign crude explorers to drill without partnering with the national oil company if the current regime is replaced, a top adviser to opposition leader Juan Guaido said.

The shift represents a major break with the policies of President Nicolas Maduro and his late predecessor Hugo Chavez. In the last decade, Chavez orchestrated seizures of foreign assets that chased companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp. and ConocoPhillips out of the country and saddled the government with billions of dollars in reparation obligations.

“We need to open up the oil industry to private investment without the participation of the national oil company,” Ricardo Hausmann said during a panel discussion Tuesday at IHS Markit’s CERAWeek conference in Houston.

State-controlled Petroleos de Venezuela SA is an “obstacle” to recovery in the oil sector, he said.

“There hasn’t been investment for a long period of time,” Schlumberger Ltd. Executive Vice President Ashok Belani said at the conference. Things in Venezuela are “badly broken.”

Foreign operators like Chevron Corp. that continued working in the country despite Chavez’s seizures would be grandfathered into the new system and not punished for cooperating with the current regime, Hausmann said.

(Adds Schlumberger executive’s comment in penultimate paragraph, grandfather clause in final paragraph.)

To contact the reporters on this story: Lucia Kassai in Houston at lkassai@bloomberg.net;Joe Carroll in Houston at jcarroll8@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Simon Casey at scasey4@bloomberg.net, ;David Marino at dmarino4@bloomberg.net, Joe Carroll, Carlos Caminada

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