Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Macri says agreement with bondholders 'great progress'

Argentina''''s President Mauricio Macri offers an interview to French media at the Casa Rosada presidential palace in Buenos Aires.

President Mauricio Macri granted an interview to France 24 and RFI journalist in which he discussed the state of current negotiations with so called “vulture” funds suing Argentina over its defaulted bonds.

Settling the legal dispute, the head of state said, would allow the country to focus its “energy” on “development, investment and the creation of employment.” Expressing he was “optimistic” about a possible agreement with hedge funds, Macri considered “great progress” recent news that US judicial authorities “said that if we approve the laws that allow us to pay and if we pay to those we have made an agreement with, they will lift the restrictions so that we can trade and finance with the world again.”

In the interview to international media, Macri also ratified his critcism of the administrations of former presidents Néstor Kirchner and Cristina Fernández accusing them of “destroying the State,” as he denied his government was “persecuting” Kirchnerite political activists following the wave of massive layoffs in the public sector that began when took office back in December.

Macri said his job was to “make the country grow and give Argentineans work.”

“Kirchnerism spent 12 years talking about the State and the only thing it did was to destroy it. We don’t have a single statistic, it got into debt, wasted (funds) in terms of income, there was no State with the intelligence to know where to invest,” he said and defended the actions carried out by his administration which are to “remove the people that have no work” or was fraudulently appointed to a post in the State.

“Without the State, Argentina won’t be able to move forward. We have to stop using the State as spoils of war of politics, where each comes to put his friends or relatives.”

The interview was granted ahead of Wednesday’s visit by French President Francois Hollande to Buenos Aires. Macri will be meeting Hollande tomorrow and said he had “hope” that an agreement unfreezing negotiations between the European Union and the Mercosu will be signed “within 30 days.”

Queried about Argentina’s long-standing demand over the sovereignty of the Malvinas Islands, the head of state said “we are committed to find a solution to our demand, which is genuine, based on dialogue.” He said the settling of the conflict “will take many years of talks but we have to start having them.”

“For that, I proposed (British) Prime Minister David Cameron the meeting we held in Davos in which, without resigning to what belongs to us, (I told him) we are ready to sit to talk and renew ties in other matters, just like they have in Spain where they have a similar disagreement.”