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Minister Kicillof gave a press conference this afternoon to announce the next steps in the dispute (photo: Maria Candelaria Lagos/Télam/dsl)
Economy Minister Axel Kicillof announced today that the Argentine government will request Judge Thomas Griesa reinstate the stay that suspended the application of his ruling on the vulture funds case, so that exchange bondholders can be paid at the end of the month whilst the government negotiates with the holdouts.
“It is essencial that the judge grants this measure so that Argentina can keep paying its exchange bondholders normally, and in this way carry out a conversation which we need to have in equal conditions for 100% of our creditors,” said Kicillof.
Argentina must pay the exchange bondholders on 30th June, but Judge Griesa’s ruling orders that the holdouts be paid the amount owed to them in full at the same time. If the stay is not reinstated, Argentina would miss the payment, defaulting on its debt with the creditors that participated in the debt restructuring processes.
The announcement comes after a speech by President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who said on Friday that her government is willing to negotiate and to “fulfill its obligations with the 92.4%” of exchange bondholders and “also with those that didn’t participate” in the debt swap.
The speech was followed by a full-page ad in three important US newspapers —The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post— titled ‘Argentina wants to continue paying its debts but they won’t let it’ and signed by ‘Presidency of the Nation – Argentine Republic’.
In it, the government goes through a historical recount of the effects of the 2001 crisis and the measures taken by the Kirchner and Fernández administrations since 2003 in order to pay the country’s debts, ending up at the vulture funds’ case, Griesa’s ruling, and the US Supreme Court’s rejection of the Argentine appeal. The last paragraph reads: “The will of Argentina is clear: we expect a judicial decision that promotes fair and balanced negotiating conditions to resolve this protracted and difficult dispute that has affected, affects and will continue to affect the Argentine people due to the voracity of a minute group of speculators.”
The post Vulture Funds: Argentina Requests Stay to Pay Exchange Bondholders appeared first on The Argentina Independent.
