Guzmán whitewashed the FdT’s arm wrestling for reservations and took off from the “pro-business” solution

“When that was discussed privately, there was a proposal to have a formal market for the issue of financial debts in foreign currency so as not to affect the accumulation of reserves in a context of great demand for dollars from the BCRA to repay private debts. And no one said to go that way,” explained Guzmán. The minister referred to the system by which private companies were forced to refinance 60% of their debts with their own resources in order to access financing from the Central Bank for the remaining 40%. “Despite that, the problem was so great that there was a lot of outflow of dollars. We knew that they were going to take that debt and that the companies were going to capitalize for more productive capacity at the cost of fewer reserves. It was decided to go that way, ”he specified.

The official then refused to whitewash which sectors of the FdT rejected his proposal although, in the context of the interview, he implied that Kirchnerism could support it to shield the reserves and did not. “I’m not going to say it, everyone knows. Consequences are consequences,” he replied.

A series of consultations of this newspaper near Guzmán and in other economic divisions of the Government partially reconstructed that debate of September 2020. The proposal to subject companies to redeem their debts at the value of the financial dollar was opposed by the president of the Central, Miguel Pesce, and other officials aligned with Alberto Fernández such as Matías Kulfas (Productive Development), Cecilia Todesca (then deputy chief of staff) and Mercedes Marcó del Pont (head of AFIP), who also had implicit and even explicit endorsement from the nucleus Kirchnerist.

For example, the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, was part of the discussions, part of a league of leaders who between 2020 and last year managed to restructure their debts with the same benefit as the private ones. In Economy they are called “those of the easy payment category”. But also La Cámpora, despite criticism of the economic team, ran away from that debate. The consulted officials point out that the same loss that was anticipated for the private sector in case of being subjected to the financial dollar could be foreseen for YPF, which manages that political space, or for AySA, in charge of Sergio Massa and Malena Galmarini.

Guzmán, in any case, only referred in the interview to private debts and diplomatically omitted alluding to provincial or state-owned companies. After recalling that last year there was a US$14.7 billion trade surplus, he highlighted that “between 2020 and 2021 there was a debt payment of US$8.3 billion from private companies” which liquefied a large part of that result along with a payment of US$ s5,100 million to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).