The investigation into the government’s bond purchases will bear fruit a first result this Thursday. That day, the National Securities Commission (CNV) plans to carry out an initial assessment with the data requested by more than 10 brokerage firms to find out if there have been any irregularities in the operation launched last week by the Ministry of the Economy to stop the race against the dollar, which continues to put reserves under pressure.
According to market sources, the body responsible for monitoring financial transactions with shares and bonds is putting the magnifying glass on what happened last week, especially in the days leading up to Sergio Massa’s announcement. Suspicion falls on the fort increase in the volume traded of the global bonds in dollars, used to operate with financial dollars (CCL and MEP) and which are part of the repurchase offer of the Central Bank.
“They are asking about Monday and Tuesday’s sovereign bond buying trades,” a trader said. “They ask about the operations of the entire past weeknothing out of the ordinary and reasonable in light of the complaint and the requested investigation,” explained another source familiar with the notifications that began reaching major market players on Monday.
The CNV seeks to know who are the people or investors who have operated, its file or capital account, the reasons for the operations, the ownership, the relationship between the brokerage firm and the client, and if it is part of an economic group. The goal is to check if it was there “inside information” and “speculative maneuvering” with stocks that need to be dollarized, but don’t trust the market to deliver results.
Consultations are also carried out on those operators who have agreed to take short-term debt in dollars (guarantee) at stellar interest rates: against an average of 1 or 2% in recent months, They agreed to pay 20% annually a day before Massa’s announcement.
What generates the most noise is the lawyer’s legal complaint Alejandro Sanchez Kalbertmatten, for which Massa asked the head of the CNV, Sebastiano Negri, to provide the list of natural and legal persons who in the days prior to the measure purchased securities and carried out operations with securities. The heart of the complaint are the “doubts” expressed by the former finance minister, Alfonso Prat Gay, on the possible use of privileged information.
“Hopefully no officials have bought those stocks recently,” the former official said on Twitter. For the complainant, that comment supports the request for verification but brokerage firms don’t share that. “The possibility of proving that is very low, it disarms itself, the complaint is a piece of paper. It has no evidence, it is based on a ‘doubt’,” said an operator.
In response to questions from the opposition, Massa ordered an investigation by the CNV, an independent body headed by the Ministry of Economy. Not only to find out if there has actually been a leak from the political or business sphere, but also to investigate an alleged “speculative attack”, a hypothesis that in the city is read as an attempt to justify the intervention of the BCRA in the market constraint .
“What we are discussing is whether there has been a group of people or individuals in the past few days or weeks in a coordinated way trying to force a rise in financial dollars, which involves manipulating the bond market, that is what which was cut with the repurchase of bonds”, they pointed out from an official office, where they believe that the official provision has generated “winners and losers”.
Since the beginning of official purchasesCentral has accumulated more than $300 million in dollar bondsYes, but currency pressures persist. The CCL dollar fell to $360.03 on Tuesday and the MEP dollar rose to $353.85. Against this backdrop, the BCRA applied yesterday a sharp hike in the repo liability rate to 68.4% a year nominal, a measure that is seen by the market as a sign of “despair” for the containment of the CCL because the entity pays the pesos they lend a day cost dearly.
Source: Clarin
