The bondholders want Kicillof and other former officials to testify in New York about the manipulation of the Indec

Cristina Kirchner, Hernan Lorenzino and Axel Kicill

The vulture fund Aurelius Capital Master requested that a group of former Argentine officials testify under oath in a court in New York in the case of the alleged manipulation of GDP data in the government of Cristina Kirchner.

Aurelius Capital Master requested assistance from the Court of The Hague so that, through an Argentine court, it orders the officials mentioned on the list to testify under oath in a New York court in the Coupon PBI case and the alleged manipulation of INDEC, informed the expert in debt Sebastian Maril.

Maril specified that the “vulture fund wants Kicillof, Lorenzino and other former officials of the Kirchner government to testify in the GDP coupon case and the alleged manipulation of Indec.”

In dialogue with Infobae, Maril indicated that “if the Argentine courts do not accept this request from the plaintiffs, when it is validated by Judge Loretta Preska, the bondholders will ask the judge to declare them in contempt, a situation that Argentina has already experienced. in its years of default and that will surely be a bad precedent for the other cases that the judge has on Argentina, such as that of YPF”.

In the list of the letter presented last night by the bondholders to Preska are the former Ministers of Economy Hernán Lorenzino, Axel Kicillof -governor of the province of Buenos Aires-; the former Secretary of Finance, Sergio Chodos, current Argentine representative before the International Monetary Fund (IMF); former Vice Minister Emmanuel Alvarez Agis; and Juan Cuatrommo, former undersecretary of economic programming and current president of Banco Provincia.

Also, to the former directors of the Indec during the maneuvers, which are also investigated by the Argentine federal justice, Norberto Itzcovich and Fernando Cerro, in addition to other officials of the Ministry of Economy during those years, such as Francisco Eggers, Federico Thea, Facundo Proietti, Luis Briones Rouco, Claudio Din, Ariel Abelar and others.

At the end of 2021, the New York federal court of Loretta Preska – who took charge of the cases of the late Thomas Griesa – ruled that Argentina should reveal the methodology used by Indec to measure economic activity in 2013, during the second term. by Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

The tweet of the expert Sebastián Maril

In their letter to Preska yesterday, the funds stated that they “respectfully request that the Tribunal sign the attached letters rogatory, requesting the assistance of the Argentine courts in obtaining the testimony of certain former Argentine government officials, all but two of all the who have been identified by the Republic as persons with “important” information.

The intervention of The Hague

“Although the Republic has indicated, in most cases, that these witnesses should be contacted through the Republic or through their attorney, the Republic maintains that it cannot present them for depositions. Accordingly, the plaintiffs must proceed through the Hague Convention procedures if they want to obtain evidence from these individuals.

“Under the Hague Convention, United States courts may apply to the competent authority of another Contracting State, by means of a letter rogatory, to obtain evidence, or to perform some other judicial act,” they concluded.

The judicial decision is linked to the lawsuit initiated in the country -in the United States- by Aurelius Capital Management, due to the way in which Argentina calculated the GDP. Meanwhile, Aurelius will have to present to the court the documents that prove the purchase of Argentine titles issued in dollars, after that debt restructuring.

In a presentation made two years ago in a federal court in Manhattan, Aurelius assured that Argentina did not make GDP coupon payments linked to the bonds issued in its 2005 and 2010 debt restructurings.

According to the fund, the government of then-president Cristina Kirchner manipulated the 2013 GDP figures to avoid paying holders of the securities billions of dollars. For this reason, Aurelius questioned the statistics produced by the Indec at that time.

Judge Loretta Preska

According to the plaintiffs, the then Economy Minister Axel Kicillof had announced that the 2013 GDP had grown 4.9%, but later pointed out that due to a review of accounts (change of base from 1993 to 2004), the growth had been 2.9 percent.

In 2005, the trigger for the payment was a growth of 4% and the GDP grew 9%, while in the following seven years Argentina grew an average of 7%, with a trigger of 3.5%, the agency indicated. Bloomberg.

The coupon was always paid the following year for past growth. Meanwhile, in response to the lawsuit, Argentina affirmed that it made all the payments of those coupons, for a total of almost USD 10,000 million, for which it demanded that the US court dismiss Aurelius’ claim.

Maril, lawyer and director of Latam Advisors, recalled that the demand for the PBI coupon amounts to USD 1,200 million and is being disputed in the courts of New York and London. This is another hidden cost of the country’s supposed “debt reduction” stage, as well as the pending cases due to the 2001 default and the YPF cases, among others.

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