Argentina announces agreement with Italian holdouts; bondholders still blocked by Griesa object.
Last edited Thu Feb 4, 2016, 12:30 PM - Edit history (2)
In a press conference at the Pink House, Cabinet Chief Marcos Peña and Finance Minister Alfonso Prat Gay announced a “preliminary agreement” between Argentina and Italian bondholders suing the country over a US$900 million debt.
The suit was originally filed by lobby known as Task Force Argentina, which represents 50,000 Italian holdout bondholders and was the first to litigate against the country following Argentina's 2002 default on most of its sovereign bonds.
Argentina resumed bond payments after a successful restructuring in 2005, and by 2010 most Italian bondholders accepted the swap. Italian nationals had become the largest group of foreign retail investors in Argentine bonds when, during the 1990s, banks in their country purchased US$14 billion in bonds and then resold them to nearly half a million investors.
The deal will allow Argentina to resume service on the US$900 million in Italian-held bonds that remained, which account for 15% of all bonds claimed by holdouts who remained outside Argentina's debt restructuring agreements in 2005 and 2010.
The 95% of Italian bondholders who had accepted the 2005 and 2010 swaps, whose payments have been impounded at the behest of vulture funds by order of Judge Thomas Griesa, objected to the announcement however.
Speaking to local news daily Infobae, the chief counsel for the restructured Italian bondholders, Tullio Zembo, stated that “it would be opportune to first resolve the situation of those whose bonds were restructured. This announcement does not take the 95% of Italian bondholders that accepted the 2010 swap into account.”
“Argentina paid regularly until June 2014 when the Griesa ruling, ratified by the Supreme Court of the United States, blocked the Bank of New York from handling our payments,” Zembo recalled. “It would then be appropriate to see how you can solve the situation of those bondholders who sacrificed 65% of their principal to accept the restructuring. We weren't mentioned at all.”
At: http://buenosairesherald.com/article/207975/govt-announces-agreement-with-italian-bondholders
And: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=es&u=http://www.infonews.com/nota/279151/malestar-por-el-preacuerdo-con-bonistas&prev=search
