Argentina will submit a proposal to settle a decade-long legal battle with holders of defaulted bonds from 2001 later this month, according to the Finance Ministry.
Finance Secretary Luis Caputo met for five hours Wednesday with representatives of the holdout creditors in New York for the first time since President Mauricio Macri took office last month. The proposal will be submitted to court-appointed mediator Daniel Pollack during the week starting Jan. 25 and will address principal holdout creditors as well as “me-too” bondholders, who have also won rulings on defaulted debt, he said. The creditors, who rejected the terms of two debt restructurings that imposed losses of 70 percent, are expected to submit their own proposal at the same time, the ministry said in a statement.
The meeting was “definitely satisfying,” Caputo told reporters when he left Pollack’s office in Midtown Manhattan. “I’ve traveled here four times in a month, so like I told the mediator: I’ve seen him more than my own family, so it’s obvious that we want to negotiate and we think if the holdouts have the same intention then we should arrive at an agreement."
The parties will schedule another meeting once proposals are submitted, he said. Stephen Spruiell, a spokesman for holdout creditor Elliott Management, which has led litigation against Argentina, didn’t return a phone call seeking comment on the meetings.
Caputo, the former head of Deutsche Bank AG in Argentina, has traveled to New York to meet with Pollack, bankers, and attorneys since Macri took office Dec. 10. Macri has pledged to end the debt conflict, which has kept the nation from tapping international bond markets for 14 years and triggered a second default last year when his predecessor Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner refused to obey U.S. Court orders to pay the holdouts.
Argentina, which defaulted on a record $95 billion in 2001, owes $9.8 billion to holdout creditors, Finance Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay said Wednesday in Buenos Aires. The litigation is “part of what we inherited” and must be resolved, as it has been costly for the country and is not helping Argentines, he said.