In the tug-of-war to agree on the final text of the so-called Omnibus Law, the Government would renounce, among other things, the possibility of transferring to the Treasury the entire assets of the Sustainability Guarantee Fund (FGS) that the ANSeS currently administers. For now, government bonds and other smaller assets would go to the Treasury but not the shares of private companies that are now owned by FGS. This stock portfolio is estimated to have a real market value of approximately 6.5 billion dollars.
In the FGS there are documents from, among others, the Galicia and Macro banks, Tenaris, Telecom, Grupo Clarín, Pampa, Papel Prensa, Aeropuertos 2000… In many of them there are directors who represent the actions of the State.
These companies were originally purchased by funds managed by AFJP. The money for these purchases was contributed by those who had chosen the private pension system. This is The State appropriated it in 2008, without putting a penny into it.
But many like to say that they are funds for pensioners.
When we talk about shares of companies that could be sold, we are talking about “grandmother’s jewels”. A questionable definition, of course.
The point is that when the Omnibus law was discussed in Congress, Kirchnerism and the left blocs spoke out strongly against the sale of these shares, as if they were trying to avoid a cardinal sin or irreparable damage to the state.
This refusal aims to block legitimate discussion. What use are these actions to the State if it can’t do anything about it? Because it would be wrong to sell them on the market – with a public, transparent tender and to the highest bidder – and obtain the funds to deal with, without going further, a portion of the fiscal deficit?
Assuming the value of the sale is $6.5 billion, these funds could, if desired, finance part of the tax hole, or settle the sentences in lawsuits won by pensioners, or pay AUH 130 million. Having the shares and not being able to use them is like having a lithium deposit and not exploiting it.
Today the State, as mentioned, has directors in several of them, but their role is absolute passive. The state is not given the votes to overturn a review panel decision.
True to her style, at the end of Cristina Kirchner’s second presidency, another bureaucratic layer was created: the National Agency for State Investments in Enterprises (ANPEE), a sort of coordination of the directors appointed by the State in the companies owned by FGS. At the time, the government claimed that the creation of this agency was expected “Ensure and preserve the sustainability of the FGS”
It may be that this Agency has contributed to ensuring and preserving the sustainability of the FGS, but it is also true that the FGS This did not help pensions maintain their purchasing power.
It happens that the FGS was created to meet the needs of the ANSeS in case a crisis prevents payment to the organization’s beneficiaries.
Let it be known, in these years in which the purchasing power of pension assets has fallen between 30 and 40%, The FGS has not put a burden to supplement the payment of pensions or pensions.
The point is that the blocs of parliamentarians of the hardest opposition have come out to demonstrate that they are faced, as stated above, with the liquidation of “grandmother’s jewels”. If all public or state-owned companies were defined as “jewels”, What adjective would fit Aerolíneas Argentinas?. It is a true “grandmother’s jewel”, if it weren’t for one detail: remaining operational it consumed almost 10,000 million dollars from all Argentines since its renationalisation in 2008.
Source: Clarin
