The Commercial Court of England, in charge of Judge Sara Cockerill, opened the door for President Nicolás Maduro to exercise an appeal in the lawsuit that seeks to recover the Venezuelan gold reserves deposited in the Bank of England valued at 1,900 million dollars.
The decision of the British court was disclosed by the English journalist Johnn MacEvoy through his twitter account, whose translation was disseminated by William Castillo, Vice Minister of Anti-Blockade Policies of the Ministry of Finance and President of the National Observatory of Coercive Measures.
“A new stage begins in the fight to recover the gold,” says Castillo in a series of tweets that he posted on his account.
The sentence that President Maduro will appeal was issued last July by the same judge who now approves the possibility of appealing. In that July sentence, Judge Cockerill recognized the authorities of the Central Bank of Venezuela (BCV) appointed by the opposition deputy Juan Guaidó (Popular Will). On that occasion, the judge pointed out that “there are no bases for the recognition of the rulings on which the Maduro board is based.”
Judge Cockerill, who oversees the case, noted that the legal issues at stake are “effectively unprecedented.” For this reason, she authorized the “Junta de Maduro” to appeal its own decision, an unusual sentence, says the English journalist according to the translation of Vice Minister Castillo.
Venezuela argued before that English court that if they were allowed to give Guaidó control of Venezuelan assets, they could be transferred to the personal accounts of that opposition leader and his associates, “to finance an armed insurrection in Venezuela,” the report says. The English journalist interpreted that this would place the United Kingdom “in a dangerous, embarrassing and practically unprecedented position.” Precisely a book published by the former United States Secretary of Defense, Mark T. Esper, describes conversations with Guaidó about an “operation special addressed directly to Maduro.
