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Venezuelan Investment in Florida: 1979

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

Mira Wilkins
Mira Wilkins*
Affiliation:
Florida International University
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Since 1973, Venezuela has had extraordinary oil revenues. These go to the government and from the government to its employees and contractors. The monies have filtered into the Venezuelan economy, where large profits have been made in selling imported goods, construction, banking, and light industry. There are opportunities for investment in Venezuela, but the affluent Venezuelan is already a participant in a multitude of businesses; thus, when Florida real estate brokers sold properties in Caracas, Venezuelans, who had been looking for places to invest monies, were obvious customers. Indeed, so great had been the number of purchases of Miami condominiums that the Venezuelan government, in November 1977, put restrictions on sellers in Venezuela of foreign land and real estate, but not on the buyers. Monies have continued to flow out of Venezuela, which (at the time of this writing) has no restrictions on the capital exporter.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , 1981 , pp. 156 - 166
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

In preparing this research note, I have incorporated suggestions from Joseph S. Tulchin, Anthony Maingot, Mostafa Hassan, and Guido Pennano. I am grateful to each of these individuals for his suggestions.

References

Notes

1. El Nacional (Caracas), 25 Nov. 1977, details the restrictions which were stimulated by Venezuelan investments in condominiums in Miami.

2. International Monetary Fund, Annual Reports on Exchange Restrictions.

3. Mira Wilkins, Foreign Enterprise in Florida: The Impact of Non-U.S. Investment (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1979).

4. Ibid., pp. 22–26.

5. Carlos F. Díaz-Alejandro, “Foreign Direct Investment by Latin Americans,” in Tamir Agmon and Charles R Kindleberger, eds., Multinationals from Small Countries (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), p. 167, notes that quantitative evidence on Latin American foreign investment is not easily found.

6. See Public Law 95–460, 14 Oct. 1978; form number ASCS-153, U.S. Department of Agriculture; and Federal Register 44 (6 Feb. 1979), pp. 7115–18 for the regulations.

7. These schedules are located at the ASCS office in Homestead, Florida. My task was made simpler by the extraordinary care of Jo Ann Dellinger of the ASCS office. She had checked each form, sent back improperly completed ones, and talked with the representatives of the foreign investors. She was marvelously helpful.

8. Foreign investors on occasion specified that part of their holding consisted of nonagricultural land. There was no consistency in reporting in this respect. Some investors in agriculture reported their whole acreage and indicated that a certain amount was not in agriculture; others reported only their agricultural land.

9. Data from Dellinger, ASCS, Homestead, Florida, 13 Nov. 1979.

10. Taking into account underreporting, the figure is undoubtedly larger.

11. The data supported the earlier conclusions in Wilkins, Foreign Enterprise, p. 20, on the primacy of Canadian investment. We know, for example, of two Canadian holdings totaling 13,500 acres in Dade County, of which only 3,520 acres were reported since the remainder was not used for agriculture.

12. In April 1977, I visited Curaçao in the Netherlands Antilles. While there, I learned that it was common for Venezuelans to use Netherlands Antilles corporations for U.S. investments. The U.S. and the Netherlands have a tax treaty that extends to the Netherlands Antilles. See Marshall Langer, International Tax Planning, 2d ed. rev. (New York: Practising Law Institute, 1979) on the tax advantages for the foreign investor of using a Netherlands Antilles corporation.

13. When the U.S. Department of Commerce did its major benchmark survey of direct foreign investment in the U.S., land ownership of less than 200 acres was excluded. U.S. Department of Commerce, Foreign Direct Investment in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1976), 9 vols. Its data thus excluded much of what AFIDA includes.

14. The owners were Jesus Hernandez, Andres Manuel Prado D'Lucca, and Juan Vicente Prado D'Lucca. All were Venezuelans, although Hernandez listed a Coral Gables address.

15. The AFIDA form asked information on the date of land acquisition.

16. Jack Friedman, “Report to the U.S. Department of Agriculture on Foreign Investment in U.S. Real Estate” (forthcoming), found a propensity on the part of all foreign investors to have a higher cash contribution than their domestic counterparts.

17. Wilkins, Foreign Enterprise, p. 94. Data on bank ownership was collected from the Comptroller of the Currency in Washington, the Federal Reserve, and state banking authorities in Florida.

18. Data from American Bank Directory 1978 and 2979.

19. I have met the banker who claims he made this suggestion to a Venezuelan group.

20. Florida National Banks of Florida, Inc., press release, 21 Nov. 1978.

21. Securities and Exchange Commission, Schedule 13D, for Florida National Banks of Florida, Inc., 12 Mar. 1979.

22. On 12 March 1979, the group bought 200,000 shares at $15.73 per share or $3,120,000. The earlier purchase had thus been of 300,000 shares. Since the Wall Street journal (22 Nov. 1978) reported the price of the company's stock on 21 Nov. 1978 at $16.25, that purchase would have been $5,850,000. Thus, the total Venezuelan interest so far is $9 million.

23. The ASCS office in Gainesville, Florida, collects the AFIDA forms for the entire state. A review of its statewide tabulations indicates that both in numbers and dollar sums the foreign investment, particularly the Venezuelan, reported in Dade County is formidable compared with other counties.

24. See Wilkins, Foreign Enterprise, pp. 22–24.

25. Ibid., p. 25. A luxury condominium on Key Biscayne has had numerous Venezuelan buyers, paying about $200,000 per unit.

26. Schedule 13D and interview with Venezuelans.