United States District Judge Leonard P. Stark of the District of Delaware has authorized the seizure of Citgo Petroleum Corp. from Venezuela in satisfaction of Venezuela’s numerous defaults.
The Judgement is currently sealed and unavailable to link. A redacted form of the judgement should be posted fairly soon. The creditors will not be able to move on this yet, at least until this goes through appeals and there are some hurdles and restrictions.
Citgo is evidently one of the very few Venezuelan assets available to the United States for seizure and liquidation, though it will likely be sold rather than liquidated.
This should have been done more than a decade ago when VZ seized all of the US owned exploration and production facilities in VZ when they nationalized the resource.
Youre ok with these socialists seizing American company oil interests on no basis other than they wanted it but its different when their oil interests are seized for their due debts?
Nice pro socialist double standard there.
Nothing surprising.
CITGO is headquartered in the United States and Chavez originally ran it from the United States. However, when the United States expelled a bunch of Venezuelan undesirables, he had to start running it remotely from Venezuela. But its headquarters remain in the United States.
The assets are primarily refineries and pipelines and a fleet of gas haulers. I believe cash assets have already been frozen to prevent them from being moved out of country. Individual CITGO branded gas stations are franchisees and are not subject to seizure. Hopefully the seizure and transfer of CITGO will go smoothly and the franchisees will not be adversely effected.
