On Friday, July 29, Britain’s Supreme Court rejected Nicolas Maduro’s latest effort to gain control of Venezuela’s nearly US$2 billion gold reserves stored in the Bank of England’s underground vaults in London.
The court ruled that the Maduro-backed Venezuelan Supreme Court’s ruling that the gold should be moved out of London should be disregarded.
That is the latest victory for Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido, who won a series of legal battles over the gold after the British government recognized him, not Maduro, as president of the Latin American country.
“I have concluded that the Guaidó authority has succeeded: that the judgments of the STJ (Supreme Court of Venezuela) cannot be recognized,” the judge said in the case.
WHY THE BRITISH DO NOT GIVE BACK WHAT BELONGS TO VENEZUELA?
Since the Barack Obama administration declared Venezuela “an unusual and extraordinary threat to national security” in March 2015, the South American country has come under one of the world’s harshest sanctions regimes.
These sanctions have targeted Venezuela’s oil industry, cutting off the country’s main source of income.
A report conducted by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) estimated that US sanctions killed 40,000 Venezuelans between 2017 and 2018.
Since 2017, the European Union has also imposed sanctions on Venezuela, with European banks freezing Venezuelan assets worth billions of dollars.
In particular, following US pressure, the UK froze around US$2bn worth of gold held in the Bank of England.
The Nicolás Maduro government has repeatedly urged governments to unfreeze Venezuelan assets to respond to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.
Legal documents dated 29 December 2020 show that Venezuelan opposition figure Juan Guaidó’s UK legal team rejected a proposal to use the gold stored in the Bank of England to supply coronavirus vaccines to Venezuela.
Guaidó’s lawyers claimed that sanctions are not “an impediment to the Maduro regime meeting its payment obligations” for coronavirus relief.