Argentina’s new government looks to begin talks with disgruntled creditors leftover from the country’s decade-old debt dispute promptly, according to court-appointed mediator Daniel Pollack.
Pollack said that he met Argentina’s incoming finance secretary, Luis Caputo, earlier this week in his New York office and spoke with representatives of bondholders with $10 billion of judgments in their favor last week, according to an e-mailed statement. No substantive negotiations occurred in either meeting and no new date has been set to resume talks, he said.
"Mr. Caputo expressed to Mr. Pollack the intention of the new administration to commence such negotiations promptly after they are sworn into office on Thursday, December 10,” Pollack said in the statement. "The meeting took place at the request of Mr. Caputo and was introductory in nature."
The end of President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s presidency starting tomorrow is a turning point in the debt saga that has kept Argentina ostracized from international capital markets since 2001. Outgoing Economy Minister Axel Kicillof had called Pollack biased and called for his removal. He was also called “just another vulture” by the Fernandez administration, a name used to describe the litigating hedge funds led by Paul Singer’s Elliott Management. Macri named former JPMorgan Chase Co. banker Alfonso Prat-Gay as his Finance Minister who in turn tapped the 50-year-old Caputo, a former head of Deutsche Bank AG in Buenos Aires, to oversee the holdout debt issue and review financing options.
Macri, who campaigned on a platform of economic reform, will inherit a country with inflation at an estimated 25 percent and foreign reserves at a nine-year low. He’s seeking tough negotiations with the holdout creditors to resolve the dispute and regain access to foreign bond markets. Argentina defaulted for a second time last year after Fernandez refused to abide by a U.S. court order to repay the creditors.
