Pablo Ibáñez
07/08/2020 - 9:07
- Clarín.com
- Politics
Alberto Fernández will return this Wednesday to remotely gather the governors in the Olivos estate. At the virtual summit, scheduled for 5:00 pm, he will sit next to him, Martín Guzmán, the Minister of Economy, whose presence will be the focus of the talk.
Guzmán, Clarín learned, will detail to the governors the exchange offer that the government presented to bondholders last Sunday so that, on that basis, the provinces adjust their own negotiations. He will explain it, as an official source said, "in Creole".
He will repeat the mechanism he used in mid-April when, on that occasion, he personally announced the profile of the offer to the bondholders. Since then, between twists and turns, the government has improved its offer and is now seeking a final closure.
The talk with the governors has, they assure in the government, the objective of making the idea explicit to the governors so that they use that offer as a beacon and parameter for their own negotiations .
It is not foreseen, a priori, that the virtual meeting includes another agenda that is not the debt issue despite the fact that there are other issues in dance: one of them, raised by the governors, has to do with IFE 3 so that it is paid throughout the country and not only, as Fernández anticipated, in areas with strict quarantine.
The quarantine issue, which has not been discussed in a teleconference for a long time, could also appear after COVID-19 had a rebound at the national level and new outbreaks are presented, such as the case of Jujuy.
Fernández, in addition to Guzmán, will be accompanied by Chief of Staff Santiago Cafiero and by Interior Minister Eduardo "Wado" De Pedro, in addition to the Secretary General of the Presidency, Julio Vitobello.
Several provinces, including Buenos Aires and Mendoza, are advancing with conversations with their creditors. This has to do with the external front and the debts taken in dollars with bondholders according to foreign law.
In parallel, on Monday, the government will send to Congress the project for the renegotiation of the debt in local legislation, which will repeat the offer model that was made at the international level and that is now waiting for signs of support and some foreseeable rejections such as the BlackRock background.
On Tuesday, Guzmán shared with Cafiero and other ministers at the economic staff meeting to outline a package of measures that will, as a common rule, go through Congress.
On the one hand, there was the announcement by Matías Kulfas and Mercedes Marcó del Pont of the 2020 moratorium plan, which they announced yesterday, and will be forwarded to parliament.
Guzmán, meanwhile, will finalize in these days the fine print of the debt renegotiation project in local legislation.
In the conference call with the governors, the minister will give specifications on the swap, an issue that impacts the negotiations that the provinces are carrying out.
According to a report by the consulting firm Abeceb, fourteen provinces have debt taken in foreign currency and the global amount is around 20 billion dollars.
Some, like the one governed by Axel Kicillof, are in talks and were waiting for the framework of the national offer to be defined to advance at the provincial level.
Others, such as Córdoba, are still complying with the payments but they may have to face, in 2021, when they have maturities of more pesos, some renegotiations.
Buenos Aires is the one with the highest dollar-denominated debt, almost 10 billion. Córdoba, the province that Juan Schiaretti commands, has a debt of almost 2,600 million dollars.
Much lower, Neuquén with 1,000 million and then Santa Fe with slightly less than 650 million.
The profile, however, is heterogeneous because the percentage of the dollar debt over the total debt and also the terms vary substantially. It is a critical front, for example, for the province of Buenos Aires because it has voluminous payments this year and a good part of that is in dollars.
PDL