Venezuela announced this Wednesday that a court ruling will allow it to recover 1.5 billion dollars of funds frozen in Portugal as part of the sanctions against the country after the controversial re-election of President Nicolás Maduro in 2018. “The Bolivarian Government wins its case and recovers its assets in Portugal. 1,500 million dollars were released”, published in X (ex-Twitter) the Minister of Communication and Information, Freddy Nanez.
These are funds in accounts of the Portuguese bank Novo Banco of Venezuelan state-owned institutions and companies such as the Banco de Desarrollo Económico y Social (BANDES) or the public oil giant PDVSA, according to screenshots of the Portuguese court decision published by Freddy Nanez. . . The decision was also read on state television.
Dollars blocked by sanctions
The Venezuelan power was subject after the re-election of Nicolás Maduro in 2018 to sanctions by the international community that does not recognize Nicolás Maduro as the legitimate president of the country. The opposition, which boycotted the vote, described the election as a “fraud”. Novo Banco had blocked the funds because Portugal had officially recognized opposition leader Juan Guaidó as interim president of Venezuela starting in 2019.
The opposition ended this interim presidency in January, considering that it had not met its goals of political change. At the time, Nicolás Maduro described the blocking of Venezuelan accounts in Portugal as “theft” and valued these funds at more than 1.7 billion dollars.
The opposition said in February 2019 that it had prevented the Nicolás Maduro administration from transferring $1.2 billion from Portugal to Uruguay through BANDES, which has branches in Uruguayan territory. Nicolás Maduro regularly assures that Venezuela has at least 24,000 million dollars “kidnapped” abroad due to the sanctions.
Source: BFM TV
