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Boudou's trip to Davos being prepared to finalize swap for bondholders
Ambito Financiero
December 14, 2009

By Ezequiel Rudman

The government began to plan out the trip by Economy Minister Amado Boudou to the World Economic Forum in Davos to flesh out there the reopening of the debt swap with the bondholders.

The Kirchner government will once again send a representative to the economic summit in Switzerland that will be held from January 27 to 31, after a year marked by the world economic crisis coming out of the financial sector.

The ministry's priority in Switzerland is to close the negotiations with the holdouts, the bondholders with bonds in default who rejected the haircut proposed in 2005. It's seen as a debt of US$28.984 billion, according to statistics from the Finance Secretariat, and Boudou's goal is to swap at least 60%.

In addition to Boudou, the driver of the return to the international markets, Buenos Aires provincial government Daniel Scioli will also go, in need of financing for 2010.

The most complicated obstacle that Boudou should face in heading off to the summit will be Nestor Kirchner, the principal detractor inside the government of any slight approach to the multilateral credit organizations.

The re-establishment of relations with the IMF as a source of financing, like the presence of Boudou in Davos, is one of the critical points of the presidential debate between Cristina and Nestor. While the President shows herself in favor of Argentina recovering its place in international economic forums, the ex-president is seeking to maintain his critical discourse on the IMF and the multilateral credit organizations.

Matrimonial debate

The debate between the presidential couple got wider last Thursday in the preview of the preparatory session of the House of Deputies. That day, Kirchner should have sworn in to his seat and accepted the new opposition majority in the chamber, but the ex-president incited all the government deputies to rally at the offices of Eduardo Fellner to break the accord with the other parties for the assigning of committees and the leadership of the House.

This is my government, stand down now on this debate," was the order by phone from Cristina de Kirchner obliging her spouse and the rest of the deputies to return to the chamber.

Now the rebellion from Deputy Kirchner is reaching the negotiations with the holdouts and the preparations for the trip by Boudou to Davos. The ex-president even went so far as to de-authorize the head of the Palacio de Hacienda who had denied any possibility of the government pushing a financial institutional reform bill in Congress to not inhibit the final steps in the process of the debt swap coming together in Switzerland.

Presence

The Davos forum each year counts on the presence of the financial, business and economic elite of the world. For the past two years of her mandate, the President pushed to deepen the insertion of the country into the foreign credit markets. For that, Boudou's mission in Switzerland will be to sell the Argentine model as one that better recovered from the international financial crisis at least at two panels that he could share with the CEOs of the main banks of the world, presidents and finance ministers of the most developed nations.

Since the arrival of Kirchnerism in power, the only Argentine official that represented the country in 2005 was the secretary of commerce and international economic relations at the Foreign Ministry, Alfredo Chiarad a.

Last Friday, after a meeting with Cristina, Boudou today argued that "our aspiration will be to arrive at 60 percent" which "is a good number, but our desire is to arrive at the maximum possible."

The minister confirmed that his team continues working on "completing the fine print (of the operation) with the prospect that the proposal would be acceptable to the bondholders, and that it would be better from the point of view of our country."

And he added that "is very probable that we would have a proposal that would be differentiated in some sense between individual bondholders, that have small amounts" and other institutional bondholders, who have big amounts in their possession.

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