On July 26, 2019, the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (“OFAC”) amended General License (“GL”) 8A and reissued it as GL 8B to extend it until October 25, 2019. GL 8B now has the same expiration date as GL 13B, which was also recently extended.
GL 8 was previously issued to authorize Chevron Corporation, Halliburton, Schlumberger Limited, Baker Hughes, and Weatherford International PLC to engage in transactions ordinarily incident and necessary to operations in Venezuela involving Petróleos de Venezuela SA or any entity in which it owns a 50 percent or greater interest (collectively, “PdVSA”) despite the latter’s SDN designation. GL 8B includes language limiting the scope of the authorization to transactions that are ordinarily incident and necessary to the maintenance of operations, contracts, or other agreements involving PdVSA that were in effect prior to July 26, 2019.
Please see our blog post on GL 8 here, GL8A here, and GL 13B here.