On the Attachability of Blocked Venezuelan Assets

Mark Weidemaier and Mitu Gulati

We gather that there is still activity in the U.S. government to think through the implications of the recent expansion of sanctions against Venezuela. Here’s the original version of the most relevant Executive Order. In brief, it provides: “All property and interests in property that are in the United States, that hereafter come within the United States, or that are or hereafter come within the possession or control of any United States person of the following persons are blocked and may not be transferred, paid, exported, withdrawn, or otherwise dealt in…” The new sanctions add PDVSA to the blocked list.

One question is whether this stops the Crystallex attachment proceeding in its tracks. After all, shares in PDV-H are an interest in property owned by PDVSA, and an execution sale is nothing if not a transfer of assets. To spin this out even further, what about the shares in CITGO-H, which were pledged as security for the PDVSA 2020 bonds? If the sanctions extend to property owned by entities controlled by PDVSA, then the sanctions would also seem to block holders of the PDVSA 2020s from foreclosing (without first getting a special license). These complexities will require clarification; perhaps Treasury will provide it soon.

More broadly, let’s assume that the effect of the sanctions is to divert a significant pool of assets into some blocked accounts in the U.S. As we said in our prior post, we are skeptical that there is a big pool of assets, but we might be wrong. Let’s further assume that the U.S. administration eventually declares that Juan Guaidó and associates, as the officially-recognized leaders of Venezuela, have access to the funds. Are the funds now attachable by Venezuela’s creditors (like Crystallex)? At least as a formal matter, the answer would seem to be “yes.” The assets would no longer be blocked, and would also seem to belong to the government. Creditors with claims against the government would be entitled to assert claims (subject to the law of foreign sovereign immunity). Yet this can’t be the intended result—or so we hope. It would effectively divert government assets to a handful of creditors, enabling them to achieve disproportionate recoveries (compared to other creditors) at the expense of the Venezuelan people. We hope the administration will make clear this is not the intent.