While holding that office, El Aissami faced allegations of participating in corruption, money laundering and drug trafficking associated also to Hezbollah.

[16] After graduating with magna cum laude honors, El Aissami maintained his connections with fellow ULA students as he entered into politics, with members of Utopia later obtaining positions in Venezuela's Bolivarian government.

[citation needed] The same year,[20] after El Aissami had lost the student reelection campaign, Cabezas invited him to work as his deputy at ONIDEX.

[citation needed] After being established in the capital city of Caracas, El Aissami later campaigned to become a legislator in the National Assembly, winning a seat in the 2005 parliamentary elections.

[27] According to analyst David Smilde of Washington Institute on Latin America (WOLA), while serving as Governor of Aragua, El Aissami "presided over a police force that came to be one of the most violent and abusive in the country".

[32] While serving in the ministry, El Aissami was also named as an External Director of Venezuela's state-run oil company, PDVSA.

[34] On 29 November 2022, Petroleum Minister Tarek El Aissami met in Caracas with the president of Chevron Corporation, Javier La Rosa.

The most important joint ventures where Chevron is involved in Venezuela are Petroboscán, in the west of the nation, and Petropiar, in the eastern Orinoco Belt, with a production capacity of close to 180,000 barrels per day between both projects.

[9] According to The Wall Street Journal, El Aissami has been under investigation by the United States for his alleged activities in drug trafficking since 2015.

US officials accused him of facilitating drug shipments from Venezuela to Mexico and the US, freezing tens of millions of dollars of assets purportedly under El Aissami's control.

[42][43] A day later, Venezuela's opposition-controlled National Assembly voted in favour of opening an investigation into El Aissami's alleged involvement in drug trafficking.

The alleged "pipeline" consists of 40 shell companies which have bank accounts in Venezuela, Panama, Curacao, St. Lucia, Miami and Lebanon and is also involved in drug smuggling.

", an investigation performed focusing on the sale of Venezuelan passports to individuals in the Middle East, specifically Syria, Palestine, Iraq and Pakistan.

A confidential intelligence report obtained by CNN linked El Aissami to 173 passports and ID's given between 2008 and 2015 to individuals from the Middle East, some of whom were purportedly associated with Hezbollah.

The United States Treasury Department sanctioned El Aissami on 13 February 2017 under the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act after being accused of facilitating drug shipments from Venezuela to Mexico and the United States, freezing tens of millions of dollars of assets purportedly under El Aissami's control.

[42][43][56] Canada sanctioned El Aissami on 22 September 2017 due to rupture of Venezuela's constitutional order following the 2017 Venezuelan Constituent Assembly election.

The European Union stated that when El Aissami was Vice President of Venezuela, the SEBIN intelligence service, under his command, made him "responsible for the serious human rights violations carried out by the organization, including arbitrary detention, politically motivated investigations, inhumane and degrading treatment, and torture".

[59] Switzerland sanctioned El Aissami on 10 July 2018, freezing his assets and imposing a travel ban while citing the same reasons of the European Union.

Zaidan El Aissami also alleged that the United States may have been responsible for the 11 September terrorist attacks to create an excuse to invade Afghanistan.

[63] Aragua FC was heavily sponsored from El Aissami's state and there are no records of him receiving playing time on the field as of January 2017.

[64] Prior to his participation in dialogue between the opposition and Venezuelan government as well as his appointment to the vice presidency, members of El Aissami's family, including his father and mother, traveled to stay in the United States for unknown reasons in late October 2016.