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O cials in Mexico City have said they want to reach this goal in order to avoid a downgrade in the country’s credit rating and to stabilise the country’s ratio of debt to GDP.
Gaytan was speaking shortly a er President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he was not keen to withdraw money from the oil fund to shore up Pemex, the national oil company (NOC).
e president justi ed this stance by saying he feared that doing so would create the impres- sion of a crisis at the state-owned rm.
Earlier this year, Mexico’s Finance Minis- ter Arturo Herrera said that the government ought to consider withdrawing money from the sovereign wealth fund in order to help Pemex bolster its nances. He was speaking at a time
when he was still serving as undersecretary of the Finance Ministry, prior to his promotion in March. ™
Quadratin Mexico
VENEZUELA
US court upholds legitimacy of Citgo’s ad hoc board
A US court weighed in on the political situation in Venezuela last week, issuing a ruling that upheld Interim President Juan Guaido’s right to appoint an ad hoc board of directors at Citgo, a Houston-based downstream subsidiary of the national oil company (NOC) PdVSA.
The court returned its verdict on August 2 in response to a suit led by the administra- tion of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, which has been trying to establish itself as the only party eligible to appoint board members at Citgo.
Guaido, who alleged that Maduro used ille- gitimate means to ensure his re-election last year, has asserted that he has the right to do so as the country’s interim president.
Kathaleen McCormick, the vice-chancellor of the Delaware Chancery Court, ruled in favour of Guaido a er hearing arguments from both sides. She declared that the opposition leader’s appointments to Citgo’s board were valid, in light of the fact that US President Donald Trump has recognised him as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
e court “accepts as binding the US pres- ident’s recognition of the Guaido government and assumes the validity of the Guaido govern- ment’s appointments to the PdVSA board,” she declared.
Citgo, which has sought to distance itself from its parent company PdVSA, reacted pos- itively to the court’s ruling. “We are grateful that the court has rejected the Maduro regime’s e orts to use the US judiciary to advance their anti-democratic objectives,” the company said in
a statement on August 2.
McCormick did leave room for Maduro to
challenge the verdict. In the ruling, she wrote that the court would hold o on issuing a for- mal order con rming the legitimacy of Citgo’s ad hoc board until August 16. She stated that the Venezuelan president and his supporters would have 10 business days to make a case that the ad hoc board members had not been appointed properly.
As of press time, the Venezuelan presidential administration has not said whether it intends to take advantage of this opportunity to challenge Guaido’s ad hoc board appointments
McCormick noted in her verdict that the lawyers who were representing Maduro’s cho- sen board members “[did] not appear to contest the authority” of the individuals who had green- lighted the interim president’s decisions on the matter.
PdVSA
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Week 31 07•August•2019