The short news item about Chavez/Venezuela taking yet another US owned asset on trumped up charges of explotation and bad practices prompts the question is the US government ever going to extract any compensation for the Citizens, Industries & Companies it protects? (See some past positions below – and trend towards diluting compensation in favor of nationalized country that needs to be reversed)
In a liberal government the answer has been a resounding No thusfar – it has been content to let the industries flounder on their own against International courts and systems sympathetic to anti-US sentiments.
The increasing lack of action & reversed rulings (Exxons case on sizeure $6B assets PDVSA) is only increasing the boldness of government nationalization (see list below article).
Inside the US someone needs to push for the combined US interest to seize the Citgo assets before Chavez can sell them to partly repay at least the Petroleum & other industries multi-billion dollar losses!
Regards
Charlie Randall
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Some of the US/UN/Blend Past views on Compensation of Nationalized :
The traditional Western stance on compensation was expressed by United States Secretary of State Cordell Hull, during the 1938 Mexican nationalization of the petroleum industry, that compensation should be “prompt, effective and adequate.” According to this view, the nationalizing state is obligated under international law to pay the deprived party the full value of the property taken. The opposing position has been taken mainly by developing countries, claiming that the question of compensation should be left entirely up to the sovereign state. Communist states have held that no compensation is due, based on socialist notions of private properties.
In 1962, the United Nations General Assembly adopted Resolution 1803, “Permanent Sovereignty over National Resources”, which states that in the event of nationalization, the owner “shall be paid appropriate compensation in accordance with international law.” In doing so, the UN rejected both the traditional Calvo-doctrinist view and the Communist view. The term “appropriate compensation” represents a compromise between the traditional views, taking into account the need of developing countries to pursue reform even without the ability to pay full compensation, and the Western concern for protection of private property.
The case of Rolls-Royce plc, nationalized in 1971, is an interesting blend of these two arguments. This policy was sometimes known as ensuring government control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, to enable it to manage the economy better in terms of long-term development and medium-term stability. The extent of this policy declined in the 1980s and 1990s as governments increasingly privatized industries that had been nationalized, replacing their strategic economic influence with use of the tax system and of interest rates.
