The Legitimate Government of Venezuela has decided to resort to the court of the Southern District of New York, a reliable, impartial, experienced and authoritative arbitrator, to get acquainted and judge whether the PDVSA 2020 bonds are valid or not, with the intention of defending the interests of the Venezuelan people who are currently going through the worst humanitarian crisis in the continent.
Thanks to the evidence we possess, the documentation we have been able to gather, and the knowledge of the legal instruments related to the case, we are confident that the decision the judge will make will be legally correct and morally just.
By filing a lawsuit for the nullity of the PDVSA 2020 bonds, it is not intended to repudiate the debt or, in general, the rest of the private claims against the State. In reality, the PDVSA 2020 bond represents less than 1% of the external debt, so the complaint only affects a very small percentage of that debt.
Moreover, this lawsuit is the result of a careful legal analysis and a negotiation process that, not achieving a reasonable solution, led PDVSA’s ad-hoc administrative board to file for the nullity of the 2020 Bond.
It is also important to remember that the 2020 Bond, unlike the rest of PDVSA’s financial debt, has as collateral 50.1% of Citgo’s shares. It is precisely for this reason that this Bond is unconstitutional, as even the bondholders knew before the issuance of the 2020 Bond, since the National Assembly – in a public session – remarked that any contract of national public interest must, by law, be previously authorized by this legislative body, thus warning of the risks implied by those who had decided to finance Nicolás Maduro’s regime by acquiring the 2020 Bonds.
Important international firms such as Nomura Securities, Deutsche Bank Markets Research, Torino Capital and Dow Jones Industrial News also warned about the risks associated with these bonds.
For all these reasons, the debt corresponding to the PDVSA 2020 bonds cannot and should not be compared with the rest of the State’s liabilities, much less assume that the defense of the assets of Venezuelans, illegally placed as collateral for these Maduro Bonds, implies disregard of the total national public debt.
The Legitimate Government of Venezuela ratifies its will to reconcile all claims inherited from the Chávez and Maduro regimes, without prejudice to its right to analyze, on a case-by-case basis, those that may be catalogued as doubtful, in accordance with the guidelines for debt negotiation, approved by the Venezuelan National Assembly on July 1, 2019.
