Cuba property claims complicate rival bids for Canadian miner Sherritt
The tussle for control of Sherritt International Corp, a Canadian mining company with deep ties to Cuba, has drawn in two unlikely players: Citigroup Inc. and Office Depot Inc.
Thanks to a byzantine series of mergers and acquisitions that go back almost a century, both companies hold claims on property seized during Cuba’s 1959 revolution and subsequently used by the Toronto-based nickel and cobalt producer.
Now, as Sherritt looks for a US backer to help get out from under Donald Trump’s punishing sanctions, those long-dormant claims are taking on new life. Worth more than $350 million on paper, they’re also shining a light on how laws designed to protect those who lost property to the communist regime have created a minefield for the new investment Cuba desperately needs.
“These claims are a veto, not a nuisance,” said Davy Karkason, founding attorney at Transnational Matters PLLC, which specializes in US sanctions and international arbitration. “If Citi says ‘no’ nobody gets to have the mine and Sherritt goes back to square one.”
Sherritt’s fate has been up in the air since May, when the US president issued an executive order designed to chase foreign companies out of Cuba. The Canadian miner initially said it would dissolve its joint ventures on the island, which include a mine and a power-generation operation, only to reverse course when a former adviser to Trump emerged as a potential savior.
In addition to talks with Gillon Capital LLC, the family office of real estate magnate and Republican Party patron Ray Washburne, Sherritt has been approached by a rival consortium that includes global commodities giant Glencore Plc and another Texas billionaire, oil tycoon Albert Huddleston.
Washburne confirmed in an interview that he’s working to resolve at least one of the two claims as part of his pursuit of the company. “It’s the mine I’m concerned about,” he said this week in Dallas. Asked if he’d be willing to buy out the claim on the facility, he replied: “That’s right.”
Kyma Capital Ltd., Sherritt’s biggest creditor and part of the Glencore consortium, said the group is aware of the claims and “will seek to resolve them in the context of the applicable US legal and policy framework,” declining to elaborate on how a solution might be structured. Spokespeople for Huddleston didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Should the successful buyer find a formula that satisfies Citi and Office Depot, it could pave the way for untangling nearly 6,000 outstanding claims under the Helms-Burton Act that have made investing in Cuba treacherous, according to Pedro Freyre, the chair of international practice at Akerman LLC in Miami.
Any business that touches — even tangentially — on one of those claims is open to allegations of “trafficking” in seized property, the attorney said.
However, if the claim holders can be bought out, brought in as partners or paid some sort of lease, it might be “a model” for a number of the bigger registered cases, Freyre said. “Solving American claims under the Helms-Burton framework is the Gordian knot as it pertains to investing in Cuba.”
Trump has been pummeling the island with almost weekly economic sanctions as he tries to end nearly seven decades of one-party rule. The US has also imposed a de facto oil blockade on Cuba, worsening chronic blackouts. The energy crisis prompted Sherritt to halt operations at its mine in February.
Citigroup is linked to Sherritt through a legacy equity stake in the Moa Bay Mining Co. that was seized by Fidel Castro in 1960 after he overthrew US-backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. Since 1994, the mine was operated by the Canadian company’s joint venture with Cuba’s state-owned General Nickel Co. SA.
The Foreign Claims Settlement Commission — established to adjudicate claims by US nationals against foreign governments — valued the demand against the Moa mine at $88 million. It’s now held by Citi and is the third-largest of all certified cases, according to the US-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, which tracks the issue. The group estimates that, with interest, the 5,913 combined claims are now worth more than $9 billion.
A spokesperson for Citi declined to comment.
Office Depot’s connection to Sherritt goes back to 1927, when the Cuban Electric Co. was incorporated in Florida and started buying regional power plants in Cuba. By the 1950s, the company was providing more than 90% of all electricity to the island and was a major natural gas supplier to the capital of Havana.
When Castro swept to power, Cuban Electric was among the first foreign companies expropriated in the name of the revolution. Its majority shareholder at the time was American & Foreign Power Co. Inc., which in 1967 merged with another firm and became Ebasco Industries Inc. Two years later, paper giant Boise Cascade Co. bought Ebasco.
In 2003, Boise purchased OfficeMax and adopted its name. A decade later, OfficeMax merged with Office Depot and took its name. And in 2025, Connecticut-based private equity firm Atlas Holdings LLC bought Office Depot’s parent company, ODP Corp., and inherited the Cuba claim.
By that point, recovering the debt was so precarious that ODP had relegated it to two sentences in its most recent US regulatory filing.
“The company owns 88% of a subsidiary that formerly owned assets in Cuba, which were confiscated by the Cuban government in the 1960s,” ODP said. “Due to various asset restrictions, the fair value of this investment is not determinable.”
Initially valued at $268 million by the claims commission, the Cuban Electric claim has been growing at a rate of 6% annually. It’s the largest on the books and is almost three times more valuable than the next nearest one.
In 2000, Sherritt took a stake in Energas SA, a power-generation company it operates as a joint venture with two state-run companies. Those gas-fired installations formerly belonged to Cuban Electric. In July, Atlas sued Cuba’s state electricity company and Energas for $803 million under Helms-Burton.
Atlas didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.
Karkason, the sanctions lawyer, said there’s a possibility that the suitors circling Sherritt’s nickel mine might be able to cut a deal that leaves Energas, and therefore Atlas and Office Depot, out of it.
Washburne indicated that’s his intent. “I don’t really care about that,” he said of Sherritt’s power business.
John Kavulich, president of the US-Cuba trade council, said the miner is one of the “poster children” of the investment quagmire that Helms-Burton created. And the successful resolution of its case could be a “miracle of miracles” that resolves both the largest and third-largest certified claims.
No bidder for Sherritt will get the Trump administration’s blessing “unless they have the approval of the certified claimants,” Kavulich said. “It’s sort of a race for these parties to cut a deal.”
(By Jim Wyss, Ari Natter and Sybilla Gross)