A court ruling will allow Venezuela to recover $1.5 billion in funds frozen in Portugal due to sanctions imposed on the country.
Venezuela announced on Wednesday that a court ruling will allow it to recover $1.5 billion in funds frozen in Portugal as part of sanctions imposed on the country after President Nicolás Maduro’s controversial re-election in 2018. “Assets in Portugal. $1.5 billion have been released,” it said. X (formerly Twitter) Minister of Communications and Information, Freddy Nanez.
This is money in the accounts of the Portuguese Novo Banco of Venezuelan state institutions and companies such as the Bank for Economic and Social Development (BANDES) or the oil giant PDVSA, according to the Portuguese court decision published by Freddy Nanez. The decision was also read out on state television.
Dollars withheld by sanctions
Venezuelan power has been the subject of sanctions following the re-election of Nicolás Maduro in 2018 by a part of the international community that does not recognize Nicolás Maduro as the country’s legitimate president. The opposition, which boycotted the poll, described the elections as “rigging”. Novo Banco has held up the money because Portugal has officially recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as Venezuela’s interim president from 2019.
The opposition had ended this interim presidency in January, believing that it had not achieved its goals of political change. At the time, Nicolás Maduro called the freezing of Venezuelan accounts in Portugal “theft” and valued the funds at more than $1.7 billion.
The opposition said in February 2019 that it had blocked the administration of Nicolás Maduro from transferring $1.2 billion from Portugal to Uruguay via BANDES, which has subsidiaries in Uruguayan territory. Nicolás Maduro regularly asserts that Venezuela has at least $24 billion “locked” abroad because of the sanctions.
