Venezuela

Fund managers holding Venezuela government bonds face a day of reckoning after months of waiting for more than half a billion dollars in late interest payments, Bloomberg News reported. Since November, investors following guidelines established by the Emerging Markets Traders Association have marked their Venezuela bond holdings to include all the interest they were owed, even though it hadn’t shown up yet. The trade group decided to scratch that rule Monday, and say that beginning today the nation’s debt will trade flat, or without accrued interest.

Venezuela’s bonds have lost about three-quarters of their value, reflecting a dozen missed payments by the government and the state-owned oil company. But many of their bondholders are still feeling flush, The Wall Street Journal reported. A number of investors have made their money back and more, thanks to coupon payments topping 13% and large principal payments that typically begin three years before a bond matures. A recent example includes bonds from state-oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, which matured in November.

Venezuela has defaulted on another debt obligation, according to S&P Global Ratings, intensifying investor fears about the country’s ability to make more than $9 billion in bond payments due in 2018,The Wall Street Journal reported. The ratings firm said Tuesday that Venezuela failed to make $35 million in coupon payments for its bonds due in 2018 within a 30-day grace period. The government and the state-owned oil company are now behind on $1.28 billion in payments, according to investment firm Caracas Capital. S&P classifies these missed payments as defaults.

As the rest of the oil-producing world recovers on the back of stronger energy prices, Venezuela is getting worse, the result of dysfunctional management, rampant corruption and the country’s crippling economic crisis, the New York Times reported. The deepening troubles at the state oil company, the country’s economic mainstay, threaten to further destabilize a nation and government facing a dire recession, soaring inflation and unbridled crime, as well as food and medicine shortages.

Mining company Crystallex International Corp said on Thursday Venezuela failed to honor a settlement and urged a federal judge to allow it to seize control of U.S. refiner Citgo Petroleum Corp., which is owned by the country’s state oil company, Reuters reported. Canada-based Crystallex won a 2016 international arbitration award of $1.2 billion against Venezuela, which has refused to pay. The company had been trying to collect by seizing shares of Citgo’s U.S. parent company, which is owned by Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.

Venezuela investors are worried they’re getting ghosted. That’s the concern among a growing number of sovereign bondholders six weeks after the government’s mysterious announcement that it would seek to restructure its debt while also continuing to pay what’s owed in the meantime, Bloomberg News reported. It’s now been a month since a creditor meeting in Caracas produced no specific proposals, and as overdue bond payments pile up without any word from officials, the relationship looks to be on rocky ground.

One of China's biggest state-run conglomerates has sued a Venezuelan counterpart in a U.S. court in a dispute over unpaid bills, a sign of Beijing's growing impatience with its socialist South American ally as it slides into bankruptcy, the International New York Times reported on an Associated Press story. In the lawsuit filed Nov. 27 in a Houston federal court, a U.S. subsidiary of Sinopec sought more than $23 million in damages from Venezuela's state-run oil company, PDVSA.

One of China’s biggest state-owned oil companies is suing its Venezuelan counterpart in a US court, in a sign that Beijing’s patience over unpaid debts is running out as the Caribbean nation falls deeper into economic and social chaos, the Financial Times reported. A US subsidiary of Sinopec is suing PDVSA, the Venezuelan state oil company, for $23.7m plus punitive damages over a May 2012 contract to supply steel rebar for $43.5m, half of which it says remains unpaid, according to court documents seen by the Financial Times.

Back in May, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. stirred up a public-relations nightmare when its asset-management arm bought almost $3 billion worth of distressed Venezuelan bonds for pennies on the dollar. They were labeled “hunger bonds,” a nod at the country’s deepening humanitarian crisis, and critics pilloried Goldman Sachs online. Now, to make matters worse for the bank, those bonds are in default, Bloomberg News reported.

It has been called the Schrödinger’s cat of the debt world — the country that simultaneously both is and is not in default. This month, Venezuela announced it would restructure all its foreign debts, the Financial Times reported. Soon after, it began missing deadlines for bond payments and was declared to be in default by rating agencies and others. Nevertheless — apparently — it continues to make payments on its bonds.