LyrArc Article Gist
Alexandra Stevenson provides this exceptional account of how the debt deal between Argentina and the hedge funds was negotiated. A decade long deadlock was broken for the first time when Argentina's finance secretary in the newly elected government of Mauricio Macri met Jonathan Pollock and Jay Newman of Elliott Management on Dec. 7, 2015, at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. It is based on 8 intervews with the participants in the negotiations, court filings and emails. Critical to the settlement was the work of Dan Pollack, a trial lawyer with the McCarter & English law firm who acted as the mediator and made some rules including no pen and paper allowed, building trust through open discussion. Back channels helped including one setup through Marcos Mindlin of energy firm Pampa Energia in Argentina, who helped the hedge funds communicate with the Argentine negotiators. Mindlin met the hedge fund representatives at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Argentine president Macri insisted on making the terms he offered public on Feb. 1, 2016 of $6.5 billion because this is a sensitive issue in Argentina. Pollack pushed for a simple business transaction to close the issue and not the complex debt structuring the hedge funds favored. On Feb. 19, Judge Griesa of Federal District Court in Manhattan, who presided over the legal settlement, agreed to lift an injunction that would prevent Argentina from making bond payments and raising new money, and set a deadline of Feb. 29 for the settlement. On Feb. 28 the deal was signed by all the hedge funds. Argentina paid all holdout hedgefunds $9.3 billion, according to the Economy ministry, Elliott getting $2.4 billion.