Argentina seeks to delay payment of US$ 16,000M for YPF case

Argentina This Thursday he requested the US judge investigating the case of the nationalization of the oil company YPFto deny the plaintiffs’ request to execute in 30 days the ruling that requires it to pay US$ 16.1 billion to minority shareholders.

The prosecution had asked Judge Loretta Preska, of the southern court of Manhattan, to give 30 days for Argentina to begin paying the compensation and interest to which it was sentenced in the ruling favorable to the plaintiff companies Grupo Petersen and Eton. Park, stripped of their shares in the nationalization of the oil company, then controlled by the Spanish Repsol, in 2012.

“It would be an extraordinary violation of international comity to allow the execution of the US$16.1 billion judgment in this case within an artificially limited time frame.” and “would generate unnecessary and chaotic litigation,” Argentina’s lawyers allege in a letter to the judge dated September 27.

Lawyer Robert Giuffra, who signs the petition, recalls that the law firm Burford Capital, which bought the litigation from one of the plaintiff companies, Peterson Group, has sold the 38.75% of their participation in the case to third parties, “whose identity has not even been revealed.”

The sentence is equivalent to almost twenty% of the budget of the Republic for 2023, maintains the defense, which ensures that the “Payment of such a proportion of a country’s budget would not be possible for any government within the period proposed by the plaintiffs.”

“There is no certainty that the payment of the judgment, once made, can be recovered, an unsustainable result given that the Republic’s appeal raises difficult legal questions for the Court of Appeals”they add.

The case dates back to 2012, when Argentina nationalized the oil company YPF, controlled by the Spanish group Repsol. Two years later, the Spanish company was compensated with US$5,000 million to settle the litigation; This is not the case with other minority shareholders such as the Petersen Group or Eton Park Capital (25.4% of YPF’s capital), which in 2015 filed a lawsuit, alleging that the country had not presented a public acquisition offer as provided for by law.