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A US judge ruled Crystallex International Corp. will get first dibs among Venezuela’s creditors when shares in Citgo Petroleum Corp.’s parent company are sold at auction in October, which would help to pay $1.2 billion awarded to Crystallex as compensation for a gold mine seized more than a decade ago.
“Crystallex was the first creditor” to lay claim to the proceeds of the share sale so it deserved priority, US Circuit Judge Leonard Stark in Wilmington, Delaware, said in a 33-page ruling Thursday.
Shares of PDV Holding, a unit of Venezuela’s state-run oil producer that owns Citgo, will be sold at an auction starting Oct. 23, the judge said. More than a dozen of Venezuela’s creditors, with more than $5 billion in claims, have filed court papers seeking a slice of the proceeds, including German chemical maker Siemens AG and US oil producer Conoco Phillips, the judge said.
Houston-based Citgo is one of Venezuela’s most important overseas assets. An EMFI Securities strategist in March estimated its equity value at about $13.4 billion.
But sanctions against the government of President Nicolas Maduro had previously prevented any share transfer. Officials from the US Justice Department announced in May the US wouldn’t block efforts by creditors to seek compensation from the refiner’s sale.
Crystallex won a $1.2 billion arbitration award in 2016 over the loss of the gold mine. That award has since grown to $1.4 billion with interest. Venezuela’s former leader, the late Hugo Chavez, nationalized the property and turned it over to the state-owned oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, or PDVSA. Since Venezuela already had paid some money to bring down the judgment, Stark said last year that the current balance owed Crystallex is $969,999,752.93.
ConocoPhillips should also get a “position near the front of the line” of creditors after it “participated in this litigation for years” and paid significant court costs, Stark said.
ConocoPhillips had filed for arbitration under the International Chamber of Commerce after PDVSA confiscated the company’s Hamaca and Petrozuata heavy crude oil projects in 2007. The request is separate from Conoco’s arbitration at the World Bank’s International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes.
Chavez ordered the seizure of majority stakes in a number of energy projects, including four oil operations in the Orinoco River basin valued at about $30 billion between 2007 and 2009, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.
The case is Crystallex International Corp. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 17-mc-00151, U.S. District Court, District of Delaware (Wilmington).
(By Jef Feeley and Patricia Laya, with assistance from Andreina Itriago Acosta)
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