Enforcing Court Orders - Seizure Of Venezuelan Oil Tankers
Reposted from Re: BREAKING NEWS ~ Continuously Updated Post #3918. Due to its revelance to this topic. Thank you John.
Link: https://projectavalon.net/forum4/sho...=1#post1697686
Reposted from Chris Zurawski's Fakebook Post
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1NqjZWhAy4/
Trump Isn’t “Pirating Ships” - He Must Seize and Sell 300 Venezuelan Oil Tankers to Satisfy an International Court Judgment Owed to U.S. Companies
A lot of people are reacting emotionally to the idea of oil tankers being seized, but most of the outrage comes from not understanding what is actually being discussed.
So let’s slow this down and explain it clearly, legally, and step by step.
This is not war.
This is not piracy.
This is judgment enforcement - the same principle used every day when courts seize bank accounts, property, aircraft, or cargo from someone who lost in court and refuses to pay.
1. What Venezuela did (the part that always gets skipped)
In the 2000s, under Hugo Chávez, Venezuela seized oil projects owned by foreign companies, including major U.S. firms such as ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips.
This wasn’t a policy disagreement.
It was expropriation:
• Contracts were broken
• Assets were taken
• Compensation that had been agreed to was not paid
That is not controversial. It is historical fact.
2. What the courts decided
Those U.S. companies didn’t complain on social media.
They went to international arbitration and U.S. courts - the proper legal venues.
They won.
The rulings were:
• Final
• Binding
• Enforceable
Venezuela lost and was ordered to pay tens of billions of dollars in damages.
3. The real problem: Venezuela refused to pay
Here is the key point most critics ignore:
Venezuela refused to comply with the court judgments.
In any legal system - domestic or international - when a party:
• Loses in court
• Owes a judgment
• Refuses to pay
…the law allows creditors to seize commercial assets belonging to the debtor outside its borders to satisfy the judgment.
This is called judgment enforcement.
Countries do not get a free pass simply because they are countries.
4. Why oil tankers even enter the conversation
Venezuela’s primary commercial asset is oil.
Oil moves on oil tankers.
Those tankers:
• Carry state-owned Venezuelan oil
• Are commercial property, not military or diplomatic assets
• Can be lawfully seized by court order in cooperating jurisdictions
This is no different in principle from seizing:
• A bank account
• A plane
• A shipment of goods
Calling this “piracy” is legally incorrect.
Piracy is theft without lawful authority.
This is court-ordered seizure to collect a debt already ruled on.
5. The math everyone avoids
Let’s use conservative, realistic numbers so no one can claim exaggeration.
• Estimated unpaid court judgments: ~$35 billion
• Oil price used: $62 per barrel
• Typical large oil tanker (VLCC): ~2 million barrels
Value of one full tanker:
• Gross value: ~$124 million
• Net value after realistic court-sale discounts: ~$115 million
Now do the math:
$35,000,000,000 ÷ $115,000,000 ≈ 300 tankers
That’s where the number comes from.
Not one tanker.
Not ten.
About three hundred.
One tanker only covers about one-third of one percent of what Venezuela owes.
6. What this means - and what it does NOT mean
This does not mean:
• Tankers are being randomly grabbed
• This is a military action
• The goal is punishment
It does mean:
• Courts already ruled
• A debt legally exists
• Enforcement is the only option left when payment is refused
When Donald Trump talks about seizing oil shipments, he is not inventing a new power.
He is talking about using existing legal authority to enforce judgments Venezuela already lost.
In plain English:
You took property, you lost in court, you refused to pay - so your commercial assets are seized and sold until the debt is satisfied.
That is how the rule of law works.
7. Why you don’t see hundreds of tankers seized
Because enforcement is:
• Legally narrow
• Jurisdiction-dependent
• Deliberately targeted
Venezuela also structured its exports to:
• Avoid enforceable ports
• Use intermediaries
• Break shipments into smaller pieces
So tanker seizures are rare, careful, and strategic, not mass roundups.
Tankers are leverage, not a magic wand.
The bottom line
• Venezuela seized U.S. assets
• Venezuela lost in international court
• Venezuela refuses to pay
• The debt is ~$35 billion
• A tanker is worth ~$115 million net
• It would take ~300 Venezuelan oil tankers to make the judgment whole
This is lawful enforcement, not piracy.
This is accounting, not aggression.
This is what happens when court rulings are ignored.
People arguing “this sounds extreme” are missing the most important fact:
The court already decided.
Once that happens, enforcement isn’t optional - it’s inevitable.
Everything else flows from that reality.
(This is Chris' post, not mine. I just thought it was interesting.)
The following is also interesting but I'm not going to ******** post it here, for obvious ******** reasons!
Edit: Well I will because it is important to understand a Venezuelan perspective on this and not hide it and he does it in his own expressive passionate latino way speaking on his thoughts on the situation in his home country.
P.S. If you suffer TDS or if you are sensitive please ignore the commentary below.
OPEN LETTER TO LIBERALS, DEMOCRATS, LIBTARDS AND THE GENERAL WOKE MOB (expletives)
I see too many ****ers in here gripping their ethically sourced oat milk latte so hard the cardboard sleeve is whimpering, staring at footage of us, actual Venezuelan human beings who have spent the last decade eating sleep for dinner, cheering for the Orange Man.
HOW DARE WE, RIGHT!?
And it hurts, doesn’t it? It feels like your brain is trying to divide by zero while some asshole kicks your junk with Delta Force boots.
Since I know you ain't gonna read all this, this is the summary: **** YOU and your "ACKSHUALLY..." gag reflex.
Too bad your squirrel mind can't fathom a guy in Caracas, who has lost 40 pounds because of a collapsing economy and whose local currency is less valuable than a used napkin, is weeping with joy because he thinks 47th is his ticket out of a socialist fever dream.
And yes, we have been waiting for this moment for literal DECADES.
But your immediate, lizard-brain reaction is to push up your glasses, scoff and say, "Um, ACKSHUALLY, do these Venezuelans realize that Trump’s stance on globalism is intellectually inconsistent with the neoliberal framework required for true South American stability?"
No, you absolute dip****. We don't.
Because we’re too busy being excited about the possibility of living in a country where Maduro's colectivos won't shoot us in the face with a sawed off shotgun, JUST FOR WALKING DOWN THE STREET.
You're more worried about the optics of a right-wing populist getting a win than you are about the fact that Maduro’s government has been running a nationwide "Hunger Games" reality for years, and nobody, not you, not the 'international community' has cared one bit about us through all this.
You: "But Trump is a threat to our institutions! He's literally HITLER!!1"
Gonna tell you a personal anecdote, you liberal POS. I personally know a guy who was snatched off the street just for BEING IN THE WRONG WHATSAPP GROUP.
The guy was disappeared for almost a year. His family didn't know if he was dead or alive, or where he was detained. Nothing.
AND HE DIDN'T EVEN REALIZE HE WAS IN THAT WHATSAPP GROUP.
A ****ING WHATSAPP GROUP.
And yes, that's the reason I'm Venezuelan, I'm living in EUROPE (shocking, right? how do Venezuelans exist outside Venezuela, you might ask!?) and I can't enter the country anymore. Or at least, not yet. Because I would disappear without a trace. Just like your abroadian-lifestyle-funding tax money in the liberal blue ****hole you live right now.
Any Venezuelan would literally vote for a sentient head of lettuce if it promised to stop these mother****ers from torturing and raping our families.
I WISH I WAS JOKING, YOU PIECE OF ****.
Your very own problem is that you view the world through a lens of virtue-cosplay. To you, supporting the "wrong" person is a social death sentence.
You can't fathom that for us, politics isn't about "identity" or "discourse".
For us, politics have become a matter of SURVIVAL.
And we have been betrayed SO MANY TIMES by the so-called political opposition, we're tired of all this ****. We've grown too old and too weary to listen to your whining about 'International Law'.
If a guy saves you from a bear attack, you don't stand over your bleeding shins and lectursplain to him about his ****ty tweets from 2016.
You say "Thank you."
And I'm PROUD to THANK Donald ****ing J. Trump for this.
But to you, modern liberal, rot of all societies, our "Thank You" is the real tragedy here, because it means the "Bad Man" got a nice gold star. Utter narrative ****ery that rains diarrhea on your carefully curated, elitist worldview.
So, while you're busy writing a 14-part thread about how our celebrations are "uninformed" or "dangerous for the global narrative," we are celebrating because we see a light at the end of a very long, very dark, very hungry tunnel.
We don't give a SINGLE FLYING **** about being tweetshamed by some prick in a Brooklyn loft. We're worried about not dying in the bowels of El Helicoide. Google that, coño e' tu madre.
So take your "nuance", put it inside a pineapple and shove the whole thing up your ass. We are allowed to be happy that our dictator is going to wear an orange jumpsuit, even if the guy helping us do it makes your therapist rich.
And for so many asking "why should we care about Venezuela?", or "Why didn't Venezuelans liberate themselves?" (All valid questions!) Here's your answer:
I am Venezuelan. 90% of us want a full-throttle aggro-crank on the pressure gauge.
Both the old "sternly worded sanctions" and conventional diplomacy have been as effective as politely asking a tapeworm to spare your Hot Pocket.
There will be no war with Venezuela for the sole reason that the Maduro regime lacks any sort of military capacity.
"And why should we care about Venezuela?" You might ask. Well, since the Hugo Chávez years my country has become the safe house for everything from Hamas and Hezbollah, under the blessing of Russia and China, pumped to the eyeballs with Cuban intelligence.
Even if Maduro is an illegitimate president leading a narco-tyranny, drugs could be the least of the US' problems. Having a terrorist safe haven in their own backyard, is.
"Why haven't Venezuelans done anything about that", we have done everything. Unarmed protests became meat grinders under Maduro's paramilitary forces. Elections have been rigged since the early 2000s. We have been murdered, disappeared and exiled.
We have literally nothing left to lose at this point.
"But can't you see that the US government is after your oil", If it was up to me, help us get rid of Maduro, help us secure the legitimate government, and I'd give the US 50% of whatever is in our soil for 20 years. I'm sure many other Venezuelans feel like this.
China and Russia are not going to do much. They'll look the other way. They have their own troubles and Venezuela is no longer as useful as it used to be.
Just a reminder that whoever uses the "regime change" words is wrong. 70% of us already chose Edmundo González Urrutia as president in 2024. Maduro simply stole the elections and won't concede.
But since these criminals control everything, from the military, the judicial system, the electoral system, the national guard and literally every other institution, we have no more options left.
So yes, I approve the ship blockade and vaporizing any drug boats with overkill rigor. This is the only language that these bastards understand.
And Marco Rubios take on Venezuela.
Re: Day 1 of Trump's Presidency... and all the days that follow
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