An American judge ruled against the Argentine State for not offering the corresponding compensation for renationalizing YPF, in 2012. Although the sentence is not final, the economic expert could determine that the country must pay some US$ 15 billion to those who promoted the judgment, according to the calculations of some specialists.
In 2012, the National Congress approved the bill sent by then-president Cristina Fernández for the State to acquire 51% of the share package, owned by the Spanish Repsol, and regain control of YPF.
Thus raised, the operation violated the statutes that the company has had since the 1990s. Specifically, a fixed clause that any new majority shareholder must offer the rest the possibility of selling their shares. It is a way of protecting minority shareholders against any change in control of the company. That was how Repsol entered, in 1999.
Then, those shareholders to whom the Argentine State did not make a purchase offer started a lawsuit arguing a flagrant violation of the statute. Argentina tried to prevent the lawsuit from prospering. But in June 2019, the United States Supreme Court denied him that possibility. Therefore, the trial went ahead and now we have a ruling against it that opens the way to determine the amount of compensation.
The current governor of Buenos Aires, Axel Kicillof, was the economy minister when the government set out to recover YPF as a symbol of sovereignty. Given the ruling against, which he described as “absolute legal absurdity”, he proposes a conspiratorial interpretation. “This is an election year, so it doesn’t surprise me that the vultures get back in,” he said, as he said they did in 2015. “Always against the same political force, against the same people, even,” he added, in allusion to Peronism and Cristina Fernández.
And he concluded: “The vultures outside are joined by the caracarachos inside, who want to use this to their advantage in the campaign,” a contemptuous way of pointing to Together for Change, since Mauricio Macri agreed to pay the vulture funds that they had not entered into the external debt swaps of 2005 and 2010, and that they had two rulings in their favor.
The truth is that, when he was a minister and went to Congress to defend the proposal to re-nationalize YPF, Kicillof described as “morons” those who thought that the State had “to be stupid and buy everything according to the law of the YPF itself, respecting its statute”. In other words, he then accepted that the statute was going to be violated; and now that a judicial ruling says that the norm was indeed violated, he has the impudence to affirm that it is another case of lawfare: legal absurdities that are drafted to persecute politicians with a first and last name, with the collaboration of the opposition.
The ruling is purely logical: the Argentine State did not respect the law and generated a picture of legal uncertainty.