There is one question that has puzzled me for a long time: Why has PDVSA never been legally pursued for being a beneficiary of the gold mining assets expropriation by Venezuela?

When the gold mines were expropriated, the Venezuelan government transferred them to PDVSA at NO COST. These assets included KRY's, Gold Reserve's, Rusoro's and other smaller operators in Venezuela. A couple of years later PDVSA sold 40% interest in these assets to the Venezuelan Central Bank (VCB) for $9.5 billion, which implies a total value of $ 24 Billion.

This transaction was geared to provide much needed funds to PDVSA to continue operating, since it was seriously behind payments to contractors (for maintenance, transportation and other services), its JV partners (for their $/barrel share of the oil produced), and suppliers (for machinery, equipment, refining solvents, etc.). As a result, many of these were reluctant to continue to provide goods and services unless PDVSA started paying the overdue invoices.

It is entirely possible that PDVSA has sold the remaining 60% share in the expropriated gold mines to the VCB, with payment in Bolivars, like the first time, since the VCB does not have access to hard currency and the Government needs all the hard currency it can get to survive. PDVSA can use the Bolivars to cover its local expenses and purchases and thus allow the government to keep the USD it receives for oil sales in international markets.

Nonetheless, PDVSA has benefited from the KRY expropriation and is, therefore, not quite an innocent, neutral party in this affair.

So, the question here, again, is: How come PDVSA has been treated as an "innocent bystander" when it benefited from selling assets involved in the KRY expropriation to the tune of billions of USD?