The U.S. court overseeing the court-ordered auction of Venezuela’s PDV Holding, the parent company of refiner Citgo Petroleum, has requested an additional three weeks to evaluate the bids for the seventh-largest refiner in the United States.
The U.S. federal court in Delaware accepted, until mid-June, binding bids in the second bidding round for the shares of Citgo’s parent company, as creditors and claimants seek compensation for asset nationalization under Hugo Chavez and failure to repay debts under Nicolas Maduro.
The deadline for a decision on the auction was July 31.
But Robert Pincus, the court officer who is overseeing the auction, requested the deadline be extended until August 22 so that the court can finalize discussions with bidders and set the terms of a deal, Reuters reports, citing a court filing.
Although the discussions with the bidders have made “significant progress”, the court officials need a few more weeks to complete these after evaluating all bids, they wrote in the request for a delay.
The sale process of shares to pay creditors and claimants against Venezuela’s oil asset appropriation and debts owed by Citgo was launched by the Delaware court in October 2023.
A first bidding round with non-binding offers ended earlier this year.
Overall, creditors and claimants have sought to recoup at courts in Delaware a total of $24 billion in claims and arbitration awards against Venezuela.
However, in the first round of the auction the highest bid was only $7.3 billion, which is just one-third of the value of the claims approved by the court, Reuters reported in March this year.
To compare, Citgo is valued at between $11 billion and $13 billion.
Citgo is the seventh-largest refiner in the United States with a total capacity topping 800,000 barrels per day (bpd). It has plants in Texas, Louisiana, and Illinois, along with pipelines and a gasoline distribution network that supplies 4,200 outlets in the United States.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
