Due to their specific strength and specific stiffness properties, composite materials are largely used in lightweight structural applications in aerospace, automotive and mechanical engineering. Understanding how these materials fail under service loads is a challenging aspect of designing advanced composite structures. In fact, the failure of composite laminated structures is often governed by complex interactions of multiple intralaminar failure mechanisms and interlaminar damages. Among them, delamination is one of the damage modes requiring a large attention due to the low interlaminar resistance between the different layers comprised in a composite laminate. In addition, this phenomenon may be triggered by the presence of defects in the construction phase or the presence of mechanical connections often generating stress concentrations in proximity of the associated discontinuities. Furthermore, coupled with local and global buckling modes, delamination can lead to an inevitable decrease in the load-carrying capacity of the structure. Previous research showed that the buckling and post-buckling load-carrying capacity of lightweight composite structures can be significantly increased by using Variable Angle Tow (VAT) laminates. However, still little is known of the geometrically nonlinear behaviour of VAT composite laminates with delaminations. In this work, the cohesive finite element method is applied to model delamination growth in VAT composite laminates containing initial defects under compressive loading conditions. Numerical simulations investigate the effects of the fibre angle variation on the geometrically nonlinear static response of VAT composite laminates compared to that of their classical straight fibre counterparts. The results are assessed for different positions of the delamination through the thickness, and they reveal the beneficial effects of VAT processes technology on the buckling-induced delamination growth in slender composite panels.