By IRNA
Madrid : Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has threatened to cut off his country’s oil shipments to the United States if a court ruling goes forward ordering Venezuelan assets be frozen in a case brought by Exxon Mobil.
The dispute centers on President Hugo Chavez’s nationalization of heavy oil projects.
“One court orders that Venezuela be frozen,” he said on his weekly television and radio program “Hello, President.” “If you wind up freezing and hurt us, we will hurt you. Do you know how? We are not going to send oil to the United States.”
He continued, “Bandits from Exxon Mobil, you will never again rob from us … world-wide mafia … that is Exxon Mobil. It is one of the companies at the tip of imperialism’s lance.”
Last week, Exxon Mobil obtained a court order freezing up to $12 billion of Venezuela’s state-owned oil company’s worldwide assets after the Chavez government forced the company out of two joint ventures last year.
Britain’s High Court barred Petroleos de Venezuela S.A. (PdVSA) from selling assets up to that amount.
The judgment stems from Venezuela’s June decision to take control of two projects it had entered into with Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company.
One, the Cerro Negro Project, was projected to yield 1.5 billion barrels of oil over 35 years.
Exxon Mobil also obtained attachment orders against PdVSA from courts in the Netherlands and the Dutch Caribbean islands seeking another $12 billion each, and is seeking another attachment order of approximately $300 million against the Venezuelan company in a federal court in New York.
In a January 24 filing in New York, PdVSA argued that Exxon Mobil “has failed to sustain its burden of establishing that an arbitration award may be rendered ineffectual without the provisional remedy of attachment.”
The United States is Venezuela’s biggest customer for the oil-rich nation’s petroleum products, importing about 1.4 million barrels of oil per day from Venezuela, according to the US Department of Energy.