A U.S. court of appeals has granted Venezuela a temporary stay, preventing six companies from joining a proposed court auction of shares in a Citgo Petroleum parent to enforce judgments for past expropriation of assets, Reuters reported. Since March, creditors, including a unit of O-I Glass, Huntington Ingalls Industries, ACL1 Investments, Koch Minerals, and mining firms Rusoro Mining and Gold Reserve, have been granted rights to seize shares in the parent of Venezuela-owned refiner Citgo, PDV Holding. The companies had won conditional attachments to a federal case in which the judge has approved a process to auction the shares to pay a $970 million judgment won by miner Crystallex. The six hold arbitration awards or judgments that total about $2.6 billion and wanted those awards to be included in the auction. The appeals court on Friday suspended the attachments until a panel could hear from Venezuela and the six companies to be filed with the court by June. The proposed auction, which could break up the seventh-largest U.S. refiner to pay creditors, took a giant step forward last month with a greenlight from the U.S. Treasury.
