Argentina Loses Court Appeal on Sovereign Debt

Argentina has been told again it must pay back more than $1.3bn (£830m) to a group of investors – 11 years after its record debt default.

A New York appeals court unanimously rejected every Argentine argument against the payout.

The decision is the latest twist in the long-running legal saga.

Argentina refuses to pay anything to investors who declined to participate in a previous debt reduction deal involving most of the nation’s lenders.

“What the consequences predicted by Argentina have in common is that they are speculative, hyperbolic and almost entirely of the Republic’s own making,” the judges said in their decision.

But the appeals court held off forcing Argentina to pay pending an appeal to the Supreme Court – which is considered unlikely to hear the case, but puts off any decision to 2014, well after Argentina’s congressional elections in October.

The appeal came after a Manhattan court ruled last February that Argentina had violated its contractual obligation to treat all creditors equally. That meant the country would have to pay the bondholders, led by NML Capital and Aurelius Capital Management.

via BBC

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Alfonso Esparza

Alfonso Esparza

Senior Currency Analyst at Market Pulse
Alfonso Esparza specializes in macro forex strategies for North American and major currency pairs. Upon joining OANDA in 2007, Alfonso Esparza established the MarketPulseFX blog and he has since written extensively about central banks and global economic and political trends. Alfonso has also worked as a professional currency
trader focused on North America and emerging markets. He has been published by The MarketWatch, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal and The Globe and Mail, and he also appears regularly as a guest commentator on networks including Bloomberg and BNN. He holds a finance degree from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM) and an MBA with a specialization on financial engineering and marketing from the University of Toronto.
Alfonso Esparza