A British court ordered the Banco Nacional de Cuba (BNC) to pay more than £18 million to the investment fund CRF I Limited, in a new legal setback for the Cuban regime within a lawsuit that has accumulated over six years of legal battles in London.
Telemundo 51 obtained documents that include both the ruling of July 20, 2026 and a letter that CRF I Limited sent directly to the leader Miguel Díaz-Canel on June 22, a month before the High Court of Justice of the United Kingdom issued its ruling.
The exact total amounts to £18,123,883.28, which is approximately 21.2 million euros or 24.4 million dollars, as part of the damage assessment phase within the process for a debt exceeding 72 million euros.
The report indicates that the BNC received a draft of the request on July 15, 2026, and did not submit any objections before the court made a decision. The ruling also granted the bank a period of seven days to request its revocation or modification.
In the letter sent to Díaz-Canel, CRF proposed opening negotiations to restructure Cuba's external debt, without demanding immediate cash payments.
The background suggested taking advantage of the package of 176 economic reforms announced by the Cuban authorities on June 18, and proposed holding meetings in London, Paris, or Madrid, seeking a solution that is "fair, respectful of sovereignty, and credible on an international level."
The president of CRF I Limited, David Charters, announced on July 31 that neither the Government of Cuba nor the BNC responded to those proposals.
Telemundo 51 clarified that it could not independently verify that the letter actually reached Díaz-Canel, and that the regime also did not respond to its requests for a reaction.
Timeline of a lawsuit that Cuba has lost at every instance
The origin of the case dates back to two loans taken out by the BNC in the 1980s: one signed in January 1982 with Credit Lyonnais Bank Nederland NV for just over 11.5 million euros, and another in January 1984 with the Italian Banking Institute for nearly three million euros, with Cuba as the sovereign guarantor.
Both debts accrued interest, totaling 72,122,664.70 euros at the time of the claim.
CRF I Limited, a fund based in the Cayman Islands that acquired those debts in the secondary market, filed the lawsuit in February 2020 before the High Court of Justice of England and Wales.
The regime attempted to derail the process by alleging that CRF had bribed officials from the BNC to obtain the debt assignment, an argument that the court rejected and that Cuba ultimately withdrew in December 2022.
To support that accusation, the Cuban justice system sentenced the Operations Director of BNC, Raúl Olivera Lozano, to 13 years in prison for bribery, among other sentences against officials of the entity, including the then president of BNC, René Lazo Fernández.
In April 2023, Judge Sara Cockerill acknowledged the legitimacy of CRF to claim the debt from BNC. The Court of Appeal confirmed this ruling unanimously in November 2024.
On March 31, 2025, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom rejected the BNC's final appeal, closing the jurisdictional phase and opening the damages assessment that culminated in the ruling of July this year.
Charters described the new ruling as part of "a consistent series of decisions favorable to CRF," which includes the judgment from the Commercial Court, the unanimous decision from the Court of Appeals, and the Supreme Court's refusal to admit the BNC's appeal.
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