Argentine Supreme Court upholds indictment against Macri's Central Bank head for 2001 Megaswap fraud [View all]
Argentina's Supreme Court rejected an appeal by the newly-appointed Central Bank President, Federico Sturzenegger, and thus upheld the decision of the Appeals Court to indict Sturzenegger for his key role in the infamous 2001 bondholder "mega-swap" that added $38 billion (25%) to Argentina's foreign debt. A lien was consequently placed by the Appeals Court against Sturzenegger for 5 million pesos ($375,000).
The indictment for malfeasance in public office pertains to his role as chief architect of the July 2001 bond swap operation as Secretary of Economic Policy under Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo (whose deregulation and fire-sale privatizations in the 1990s were blamed for Argentina's collapse in December 2001). The mega-swap involved an exchange of 37 types of bonds for longer-term, higher-interest bonds. The swap was accepted by most bondholders, and delayed up to $30 billion in payments that would have been due by 2005; but it also added $38 billion in extra interest payments, and of the $82 billion in bonds that eventually had to be restructured (triggering a wave of holdout lawsuits), 60% were issued during the 2001 megaswap.
The seven banks that participated in the operation meanwhile took 150 million dollars in commissions.
Sturzenegger was originally indicted by Federal Judge Sebastián Ramos in 2013 as a "necessary accomplice to the crime of conducting negotiations incompatible with the exercise of public office." Judge Ramos' indictment also provided for a lien to be placed over Sturzenegger's accounts. Judge Ramos's decision, however, was overturned by the Second Chamber of the Federal Court on June 5, 2014, which acquitted among other defendants Sturzenegger and Cavallo himself.
The Second Chamber ruling was appealed by the Solicitor General under former President Cristina Kirchner, Germán Moldes, who wrote that "this case has ample evidence that materially demonstrates that an economic policy decision was made by government officials on behalf of the State to favor their friends."
Third Chamber of the Federal Court of Criminal Appeals sided with Solicitor General Moldes and quashed the earlier dismissals on April 29, 2015. Sturzenegger, who by then had been elected to Congress and figured prominently in the right-wing presidential campaign of Mauricio Macri as his chief economic adviser, took the case to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, however, in a unanimous decision signed on December 15 by Justices Ricardo Lorenzetti, Elena Highton de Nolasco, and Juan Carlos Maqueda, dismissed the appeal and requested "the continuation, without delay, of the conduct of the proceedings" against Sturzenegger.
Neither Central Bank President Sturzenegger or President Macri have commented on the decision.
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I should note that his father, Adolfo Sturzenegger, was one of the architects of the dictatorship's hated Circular 1050, which tied mortgage payments to the value of the dollar in Argentina (which rose 15 fold between March 1981 and July 1982) and thus bankrupted hundreds of thousands of homeowners.
Luckily, his son hasn't learned to cover his tracks too well (the debate coach he's praising, Jaime Durán Barba, is a known CIA psy-ops asset):
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