Gustavo Bazzan
01/31/2020 - 22:48
- Clarín.com
- Economy
- Economy
It is not the first time that today Governor Axel Kicillof faces a negotiation that seems to develop at all or nothing and in which he seeks to maximize the relationship with the creditor counterpart. Until he ends up paying . What happened between the authorities of the Province of Buenos Aires and the bondholders who have the BP 21 debt securities in their possession is a film that, with nuances, has been repeated in recent years.
There are at least two antecedents in which it seemed that the negotiation was shipwrecked and in the end the creditors ended up collecting. A third in which Kicillof was willing to pay, but the operation fell at the last minute for other reasons.
The first dispute was after the expropriation of YPF shares that were held by the Spanish oil company Repsol. Kicillof came to try “tare” to those who said that what Repsol asked for should be paid, and it was even said that Kicillof had affirmed that “Repsol was not going to charge anything as compensation” phrase attributed to the former Minister of Economy but, in his favor, there is no record of said expression.
But the concrete thing is that after the expropriation and insults, Kicillof ended up paying about 5,000 million dollars for 51% of YPF . It is true that Brufau had hinted that he intended about 9,000 million. The payment method was a set of bonds that Repsol had previously agreed to sell to JP Morgan.
Kicillof also quickly closed a debt with the Paris Club. He agreed to pay a debt close to 9.7 billion dollars and from the opposition he was criticized for not fighting a take away from a single dollar . The most sharp in that sense was who would succeed him as Minister of Economy, Alfonso Prat-Gay. "You left in a plane, 48 hours, you paid him 100% with all the punitive", he said in a remembered session in the Chamber of Deputies, in April 2016.
Regarding this negotiation, there is consensus that the Paris Club has as a rule accepting removals of between 15 and 20%. But on that occasion, they didn't need to talk about that possibility, simply because they didn't claim it.
A third negotiation was nothing less than with the so-called vulture funds and occurred in mid-2014. History says that to avoid a new default for not accepting sentences against the late judge Thomas Griesa, a group of national banks had armed a proposal to lend the Argentine government the money to close the dispute with the hold outs. The most reliable version says that everything was about to be signed, with Kicillof in New York , and at the last moment the order came to abandon the negotiation. An order issued from Buenos Aires by former President Cristina Kirchner.
Back to 2020. Kicillof insisted that he has no way to deal with a payment of $ 250 million. And he asked the creditors to accept that such payment be made on May 1. In several attempts to capture 75% of the wills, the Province failed. On Tuesday, the governor acknowledged that he had "more than 50% of the creditors." But not 75%. And he announced that he would pay the bond with his own resources.
The uncertainty was total, because a default event of the main economic district of Argentina, and for barely 250 million dollars , no one entered the head. Especially when the Nation is facing its own negotiation to restructure a debt of 100,000 million dollars.
