AFP

Opposition leader Juan Guaido’s rival Venezuelan government said Friday it was a step closer to taking control of the oil-rich country’s gold reserves, after the latest judgment by a UK court.

High Court judge Sara Cockerill ruled against President Nicolas Maduro’s regime in a technical ruling concerning appointments made to the Banco Central de Venezuela (BCV) by Guaido.

She found that rulings by Venezuela’s supreme court, blocking the appointments, could not be recognised in English law.

One factor cited by Cockerill was “clear evidence” that the Supreme Tribunal of Justice had been stacked with Maduro-supporting judges.

“This is an unfortunate ruling that ultimately rests on a narrow issue of law about the recognition of foreign judgments,” said Sarosh Zaiwalla of the law firm Zaiwalla and Co, representing the Maduro-backed BCV.

“The BCV is considering an appeal,” he added.

But in a statement, Guaido expressed gratitude for Britain’s “honest and transparent judicial process”, contrasting it with the Maduro government’s focus on “power and money”.

“This decision represents another step in the process of protecting Venezuela’s international gold reserves and preserving them for the Venezuelan people and their future,” he said.

The ultimate thrust of the case remains to be decided, after the UK Supreme Court last year ruled that the dispute should be heard again by the lower Commercial Court in London.

Cockerill’s ruling put the value of the 31 tonnes of Venezuelan gold deposited with the Bank of England at about $1.95 billion. Maduro wants to recover the gold. 

But access has so far been denied as Britain, in line with other countries including the United States, acknowledges Guaido as interim president.

UK judges have already ruled that they are obliged to follow the British government’s decision on which government to recognise but had left open the legal point decided on Friday. 

Further hearings are expected later this year before the case as a whole can be decided.

The United States and Venezuela severed diplomatic ties in 2019 after Maduro was re-elected the year before to a second term in a ballot boycotted by the opposition.

In a tentative sign of a potential warming of relations, however, Washington sent a high-level delegation to energy-rich Venezuela in March, just days after Russia invaded Ukraine. 

Moscow and Kyiv on Friday accused each other of bombing a jail holding Ukrainian prisoners of war in Russian-held territory, with Russia saying 40 prisoners and eight prison staff were killed.

Russia’s defence ministry said the Ukrainian strikes were carried out with US-supplied long-range missiles, in an “egregious provocation” designed to stop soldiers surrendering.

It said that among the dead were Ukrainian forces that had laid down their arms after repelling Moscow’s assault on the sprawling Azovstal steel works in Mariupol.

The claims came as President Volodymyr Zelensky visited a port in southern Ukraine to oversee a ship being loaded with grain for export under a UN-backed plan aimed at ending a food crisis.

Ukraine’s presidency said exports could start in the “coming days” under the plan aimed at getting millions of tonnes of Ukrainian grain stranded by Russia’s naval blockade to world markets.

– ‘Petrifying war crime’ –

Following the strike on the prison, Russian state-television showed what appeared to be destroyed barracks and tangled metal beds but no casualties could be seen.

Ukraine’s military denied carrying out the attack saying its forces “did not launch missile and artillery strikes in the area of Olenivka settlement.”

It instead blamed Russia’s invading forces for “a targeted artillery shelling” on the detention facility, saying it was being used to “accuse Ukraine of committing ‘war crimes’, as well as to hide the torture of prisoners and executions”.

“Russia has committed another petrifying war crime by shelling a correctional facility in occupied” Olenivka where it held Ukrainian POWs, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba wrote on Twitter. 

Ukraine’s forces in May ended a weeks-long siege of Azovstal, with around 2,500 combatants surrendering after calling a halt to their first resistance. 

Moscow’s state media has reported that some officers — including those from the controversial Azov regiment — have been taken into Russia. 

Kyiv says it has captured thousands of Russian troops during the invasion and has begun putting some on trial for alleged war crimes. 

A Ukrainian court on Friday reduced the life sentence handed to a Russian soldier in May for pre-meditated murder in the country’s first war crimes trial, instead jailing the serviceman for 15 years.

– Mykolaiv strikes –

Russian strikes elsewhere in Ukraine killed five people and wounded seven more on Friday on the heavily bombed city of Mykolaiv near the country’s southern frontline, the regional governor said.

“They shot at another area near a public transport stop,” governor Vitaliy Kim said in a statement on social media.

Mykolaiv, near the Black Sea, has seen roughly half of its estimated pre-war population of nearly 500,000 people leave and the city has been shelled daily for weeks.

It is the largest Ukrainian-controlled urban hub near the frontlines in the Kherson region, where Kyiv’s army has launched a counter-offensive to regain control of the economically and strategically important coastal territory.

The Ukrainian presidency said Friday that Russian strikes on the city a day earlier had struck a humanitarian aid distribution point and injured three people.

In the eastern Donetsk region, governor Pavlo Kyrylenko also said Friday that Moscow’s forces had killed eight people and wounded 19 more in attacks over the previous day.

– Grain ship loading –

The ceaseless violence on the ground comes as Ukraine looks to push ahead with restarting crucial grain exports under a plan brokered by Turkey and the United Nations to lift Russia’s Black Sea naval blockade. 

Ukraine’s presidency released footage of Zelensky standing in front of Turkish ship Polarnet in the port of Chornomorsk on a visit to inspect grain being loaded.

“The first vessel, the first ship is being loaded since the beginning of the war,” Zelensky said in a statement. 

Zelensky said Kyiv was “waiting for a signal” from Ankara and UN to start exports that it is hoped will help mitigate a global food crisis that has seen prices soar. 

The hike in food costs is just one of the shock waves that Moscow’s war in Ukraine has sent reverberating around the world.

Energy prices have also risen dramatically as Moscow has cut gas supplies to Europe and the turbulence has wracked the oil markets. 

The French presidency said that leader Emmanuel Macron and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had agreed to work together to limit the impact of the war at talks in Paris. 

Macron took the meeting despite fierce criticism from rights groups in a bid to get major crude producer Saudia Arabia to up its production. 

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ExxonMobil’s profits nearly quadrupled to $17.9 billion in results released Friday that underscored the elevated state of oil and natural gas prices amid commodity market tightness.

The US oil giant saw profits of $4.7 billion in the year-ago period. Revenues rose 68.7 percent to $111.3 billion.

ExxonMobil joined rivals Royal Dutch Shell and TotalEnergies in releasing massive second-quarter profit increases in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which has pressured energy markets.

ExxonMobil’s results were also boosted by a strong performance in its downstream business amid high gasoline prices and limited refining capacity.

“Earnings and cash flow benefited from increased production, higher realizations, and tight cost control,” said Chief Executive Darren Woods.

“Strong second-quarter results reflect our focus on the fundamentals and the investments we put in motion several years ago and sustained through the depths of the pandemic.”

The oil giant, which endured a series of quarterly losses early in the pandemic when petroleum demand cratered, is prospering following the turn in the market.

During the quarter, ExxonMobil benefited from a 71 percent surge in crude price realizations compared with the year-ago period and a 186 percent increase in natural gas.

The refining business, which lost money in the 2021 quarter, notched $5.3 billion in profits.

Shares of ExxonMobil jumped 2.6 percent to $95.03 in pre-market trading.

Spanish prosecutors said Friday they would seek a prison sentence of more than eight years against global music superstar Shakira, after she rejected a plea deal on accusations of tax evasion.

Prosecutors in Barcelona will also demand a fine of nearly 24 million euros ($24.5 million) from the 45-year-old “Hips don’t Lie” songstress, whom they accuse of defrauding the Spanish tax office out of 14.5 million euros on income earned between 2012 and 2014.

Shakira, who has sold over 60 million albums, rejected a plea deal on Wednesday, saying in a statement through her lawyers that she was “absolutely certain of her innocence” and had decided to let the case go to court, “confident” that her innocence would be proven.

A formal referral to court has not yet been announced, neither has a trial date been set.

Lawyers for Shakira, one of the biggest names in the global music industry, say an agreement remains possible until the start of any trial.

Prosecutors say Shakira moved to Spain in 2011 when her relationship with FC Barcelona defender Gerard Pique became public but maintained official tax residency in the Bahamas until 2015. The couple, who share two children, announced their separation in June.

On Wednesday, the star slammed the “complete violation of her rights” and “abusive methods” carried out by the prosecutor’s office.

She claimed prosecutors were “insisting on claiming money earned during my international tours and the show ‘The Voice'” on which she was a judge in the United States, when she was “not yet resident in Spain”.

Shakira was on the singing competition show between 2013 and 2014.

Her lawyers say that until 2014 she earned most of her money from international tours, moved to Spain full time only in 2015 and has met all tax obligations.

She says she has paid 17.2 million euros to Spanish tax authorities and that she has “no debt to the Treasury for many years”.

A Barcelona court in May dismissed an appeal from the singer to drop the charges.

Shakira was named in one of the largest ever leaks of financial documents in October 2021, known as the “Pandora Papers”, among public figures linked to offshore assets.

With her mix of Latin and Arabic rhythms and rock influence, three-time Grammy winner Shakira scored major global hits with songs such as “Hips don’t Lie”, “Whenever, Wherever” and “Waka Waka”, the official song of the 2010 World Cup.