Originally from Alternatives to the High Cost of Litigation

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Venezuela’s 2011 nationalization of its gold-mining industry resulted in three arbitral awards, all grounded in the Canada-Venezuela Bilateral Investment Treaty and rendered by tribunals constituted according the ICSID Additional Facility, a set of arbitration, conciliation and fact-finding rules for parties that fall outside of the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes’ Convention.

All the tribunals sat in Paris. Each tribunal condemned Venezuela to pay compensation for the expropriation of each respective company’s assets in Venezuela: Gold Reserve $713 million, Crystallex $1.2 billion and Rusoro $966.5 million. See Gold Reserve Inc. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, ICSID Case No. ARB(AF)/09/1 (Sept. 22, 2014) (referred to as “Gold Reserve” below); Crystallex International Corp. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, ICSID Case No. ARB(AF)/11/2 (April 4, 2016) (“Crystallex”), and Rusoro Mining Ltd. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, ICSID Case No. ARB(AF)/12/5 (Aug. 22, 2016) (“Rusoro” or “Claimant” below).

Then, all three awards were confirmed by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in contested proceedings. Gold Reserve Inc. v. Bolivarian Rep. of Venezuela, 146 F.Supp.3d 112 (D.D.C. 2015); Crystallex Int’l Corp. v. Bolivarian Rep. of Venezuela, 244 F.Supp.3d 100 (2017), aff ’d (Feb. 14, 2019) (D.C. Cir.) No. 17-7068; Rusoro Mining Ltd. v. Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 300 F. Supp.3d 137 (D.D.C. 2018) (available at http://bit.ly/2HLCULI).