MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency
Group of Argentine bondholders plan 'private debt swap' to holdouts
The initiative is headed by Gramercy from the Bondholder Exchange Group A group of Argentine bondholders will offer creditors suing for the repayment of defaulted sovereign debt a private deal to get them to abandon their litigation, the state-run Télam news agency said.
The move is being driven by investment funds from the United States and Europe, largely from the Bondholder Exchange Group, Télam added.
They propose to exchange bonds on which payments have been frozen for other paper that Argentina normally honors, with better conditions than the country has already offered. The offer would be formalized next week.
The Bondholder Exchange Group, led by emerging markets investment specialist fund Gramercy, has supported Argentina in its long court battle in the United States against holdout creditors seeking to recover full payment from the bonds that the country stopped honoring after its 2002 financial crisis and default.
Gramercy headquarters is located in Greenwich, Connecticut.
“The private debt swap proposal,” Telam said, “consists of offering an exchange to the holdouts in which they drop their demand for 100% repayment.”
Two restructurings in 2005 and 2010 saw creditors holding around 93% of Argentina’s debt agree to swap their bonds in deals giving them 25 to 29 cents on the dollar.
Bondholders who did not participate in the swaps, led by hedge funds Elliott Management Corp’s NML Capital Ltd and Aurelius Capital Management LP, went to court in New York to seek full payment
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Read all commentsGood! smart people have to recognise when they lost the battle and are in not a strong position to give a fight.
Nov 09th, 2013 - 09:24 am 0more isolation for Elliott Singer CM and R. bollocks Shapiro.
Speculating on the wrong prospect has its consequences and you can end up broke...
Come on Dany, do you REALLY think Singer, et al, will fall for this?
Nov 09th, 2013 - 11:18 am 0No chance.
This is quite funny. Gramercy “fronts” the Exchange Bondholder Group. That's the bunch that AREN'T getting paid because the Court has decreed that they can't be paid unless NML etc are paid at the same time.
Nov 09th, 2013 - 12:13 pm 0But Gramercy is only offering an exchange of bonds. Not real money. And it's noticeable that they will be offering bonds “that Argentina normally honors, with better conditions than the country has already offered”. The “catch” is that word “normally”. And how long would it take argieland to decide not to honour those bonds? 72 hours? 48? 24? With the only recourse being through argie courts! Chris, you are, of course, right!
But it just goes to show how thick DB is. The Exchange Bondholder Group were actually on argieland's side! They even filed an amicus curiae brief. But they've been “losing” for some time now. Perhaps if they sold their bonds and offered NML et al the money, they would get somewhere. But I doubt it. Can't see the actual bondholders being willing to give up their “worthwhile” bonds, pay NML and be saddled with a heap of bonds on which argieland will never pay out.
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