Economy Minister Axel Kicillof has ratified Argentina’s position against so called “vulture funds” with the government seeking for «fair» negotiating conditions for all the country’s creditors.
“Two lawmakers of the PRO (party) said that vultures must be paid what they asked to be paid for, but that can not be done. If we paid (before January), it would have been 1.5 billion dollars, with the win-win formula it would have been 20 billion dollars and with the RUFO (clause) 500 billion dollars. That will not happen neither with this President nor with this minister of economy,” Kicillof said in statements to media this morning referring to the so called RUFO clause preventing the sovereign from voluntarily offering holdout creditors better terms than those of its 2005 and 2010 restructurings.
“They said that everything was going to change when the RUFO fell,” the minister said questioning the position by the American Task Force Argentina (ATFA) lobbying group that defends vulture funds’ interests.
“(Holdouts) put a fortune in the ATFA, which is a task force group that some newspapers use a source of qualified information, to extort officials and harass Argentina.”
Queried about a strategy by holdouts to release a ranking of enrichment of some Argentine officials, Kicillof affirmed such pressures won’t success.
“Instead of using rotten fish to see if some officials or ministers get scared and decide to pay, which will not happen, from the real point of view of the negotiation what I said in December that Argentina opened a debt swap and I made the math of how much it would represent for a bondholder.”
“If same conditions of the 2005 debt swap are taken, which is a generous offer, now they would have 400 million dollars and they put 50 million dollars. But what did they offer to those who went to New York (to negotiate)? A 15 percent discount: from the 1.5 billion dollars, you can pay 1.4 million dollars cash,” Kicillof explained criticizing also some local media and journalists that said the long-standing dispute with vulture funds would hinder investment agreements with China, describing such criticism a maneuver to “discourage” society.
Source: Buenos Aires Herald