A CITGO gas station. Photo: Archive.
By Marina Menéndez Quintero – June 22, 2024
As part of the economic war waged against the Bolivarian Republic, the dispossession of the CITGO company has been a priority objective for imperialism and the Venezuelan extreme right.
Auctioning PDVSA’s subsidiary in the United States, CITGO, as a Delaware court has ruled, is equivalent to dismembering, or cutting it into pieces, one of the most important companies of the Venezuelan economy.
Making it available to the highest bidder, as has happened in recent days, is a humiliating action that can be compared to the image of the scrapping of the Venezuelan EMTRASUR plane, held for two years in Argentina by order of the US, which a “complacent” Javier Milei handed over to Washington as soon as he came to power, only for the US to turn into into a heap of scrap metal.
CITGO was seized by order of the Donald Trump administration and at the request of the Venezuelan right in 2019, as a result of the unilateral coercive measures that constitute an instrument of US foreign policy.
CITGO’s sale now to foreign firms through the auction of its shares is due, however, to tangled judicial procedures that followed that illegal decision and involve, first of all, the Venezuelan authorities’ ignorance of the handing over of CITGO to spurious representatives of the opposition and the way in which they allegedly squandered the profits left by the company during the period in which Washington named them as supposed owners.
This has caused losses to the Venezuelan economy that add to those incurred by other punitive measures against Venezuela’s hydrocarbons industry, valued at billions of dollars annually. Auctioning CITGO constitutes a theft and a crime.
Lie upon lie
The interfering nature of the so-called sanctions and their harmful effects on the economy and the growth of nations, and even on the enjoyment of the human rights of their inhabitants, has already been denounced and condemned numerous times, including once again this week, in the context of the UN General Assembly.
About 30 countries from different parts of the world – including, of course, Cuba – today suffer the effects of these illegal coercive rulings, issued for political purposes and almost all by the United States, supported in some cases by Europe. These coercive measures negatively impact specific sectors important for the development of a nation. Companies and individuals are also included on OFAC [US Office of Foreign Assets Control] blacklists.
The first thing you read on the website of the Office of Foreign Assets Control of the US Department of the Treasury when explaining the “mission” of that entity is enough to understand the manipulation that justifies the imposition of these measures applied under the alleged purpose of guaranteeing the “national security” of the United States. In reality, these sanctions aim to force other nations to obey and adopt US dictates, and these sanctions are a way of ensuring the geostrategic interests of the White House around the world.
“OFAC administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions based on US foreign policy and national security objectives against specific foreign countries and regimes, terrorists, international drug traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and other threats to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States,” the digital pamphlet says.
This is enough to understand why there are unilateral, mendacious lists where Washington includes the nations that it unjustly accuses of being “terrorists;” why others are declared, without arguments to explain it, as a danger to their country; and why third parties are prevented from developing nuclear energy for humanitarian purposes, and much more.
Behind that screen is a whole scaffolding of which nations such as Yemen, Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Libya, Iran, China, Ethiopia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Belarus, Cuba, and Russia—which holds the record for being the country against which the greatest number of sanctions are in force, followed, perhaps, by Venezuela, against which some 900 have been implemented—are victims, among others. No punishment is as prolonged as that applied against Cuba, which is also the most ferocious for forming a skein of prohibitions that form a barrier which is difficult to bypass.
All the names of these countries and others, as well as those of some regions, can be read on the OFAC lists.
Of this network of pressure and extortion, the sanctions consisting of asset freezes stand out. These illegally confiscate money from the punished countries abroad, or their companies, such as CITGO, beyond their borders.
However, the latest trend in this interventionist and domineering policy is to appropriate targets and not just to immobilize them, as is going to happen with the PDVSA subsidiary in the United States and it seems will happen with Russian funds if, finally, and as has already been approved in the United States and the European Union, the more than US $300 billion in foreign assets of the Russian Bank, which have already been frozen, are invested in weapons for Ukraine.
The same has happened against Venezuela, which has between US $24 billion and $30 billion blocked abroad, according to President Nicolás Maduro in 2022.
CITGO constitutes an important chunk of these funds, as it is Venezuela’s largest asset abroad.
Guilty, who?
There is no shortage of those who, when narrating what happened, point to the just policy of nationalizations put into effect by the Bolivarian leader Hugo Chávez shortly after his arrival in the government, with greater force between the years 2008 and 2009, as responsible for the debts that are awarded to CITGO in relation to foreign firms identified as its “creditors.”
However, this ignores, first, the internationally registered right to nationalization due to, among other aspects, the interest of national sovereignty, a statement also recognized by Venezuelan laws and a factor that continues to prevail in the intention that exploitation of the natural riches of Venezuela are enjoyed, first and foremost, by the nation. It is appropriate, without ignoring the presence of foreign investors who, however, should not continue taking the majority.
Agreements adopted at the time, for example, with the American Chevron, the British BP, the Norwegian Statoil, and the French Total, firms that accepted the terms proposed by Caracas, allowed these transnationals to remain as minority partners when four crude oil refineries were nationalized. This corroborates that, in the last case, there was the possibility of agreements. Others withdrew.
Even spokespersons for the bourgeoisie allied to the political right, such as the Fedecamaras employers’ association at that time, criticized the government for spending too much money for the compensation that followed the nationalization process and complained that the Chávez government had used US $20 billion in the months prior to April 2008 in compensation, according to the authoritative publication Deutsche Welle.
But the judicial rulings in the state of Delaware and the courts involved in the process also ignore that the punishment measures applied by the United States since 2019 against the Venezuelan oil industry and even the seizure of CITGO—which Trump arbitrarily and illegally put in the hands of the puppet “interim president” Juan Guaidó—prevented the legitimate Venezuelan government headed by Nicolás Maduro from paying the PDVSA bondholders, who are also now taken into account by the US courts as plaintiffs.
However, the most flagrantly evaded element for political interest is the weight that the mismanagement of the Guaidó clique has on CITGO’s alleged debt.
Investigations by the digital publication Misión Verdad, which are based on information from PDVSA, affirm that 80% of the total of US $20.8 billion claimed by the 17 so-called creditors who have been approved for the auction of CITGO shares were used by Guaidó and his cohort to finance extensive activities. This money was taken directly from PDVSA’s commercial subsidiaries in the US, which is why the parent company did not receive dividends.
The Trump administration, the article adds, provided permission to the Venezuelan opposition to access PDVSA bank accounts in the US.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/KW/SL
