It should be noted that the presidential candidate Sergio Massa, on more than one occasion, expressed himself very critical of the loan granted by the Fund during Macri’s administration, hence this initiative must have the endorsement of the Minister of Economy.
In particular, both non-governmental Peronist deputies require that the National Executive Branch instruct the Alternate Executive Director of the IMF, Sergio Chodos, to request that organization “extreme efforts to help clarify opaque aspects of the 2018 Stand By Agreement with Argentina.”
With this initiative, Rodríguez and de la Sota intend to establish the extent to which “general IMF resources provided to the Argentine Nation, within the framework of the 2018 Stand By Agreement, would have been allocated to finance considerable or continuous outflows of capital”, thereby failing to comply with the Constitutive Agreement of the International Monetary Fund, in particular with Article VI.
This is a project similar to the one originally formulated by Rodríguez during the previous parliamentary year, in the month of March 2022, and which is now renewed incorporating more elements of analysis, with the purpose of not losing its parliamentary validity.
The hypothesis behind this request is that part of the aforementioned Stand By loan could have been used to finance the outflow of speculative capital, especially those that had arrived in Argentina during the Cambiemos government, between 2016 and 2017according to the interpretation of these deputies.
In this regard, an analysis carried out by the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic (BCRA), cited by the Special Report of the General Audit Office of the Nation (SIGEN) on the Stand-By Agreement between the Argentine Republic and the IMF, published in July of 2021, states that “in 2018, after the closure of the voluntary credit markets, a strong reversal in capital flows began, in response to which the authorities decided to turn to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which disbursed a loan record of 44.5 billion dollars”, highlighting that in the stage of acceleration of capital outflows, starting in May 2018, the formation of external assets, colloquially called “capital flight” reached 45.1 billion dollars.
In this sense, in November 2021, former President Macri declared to the television network CNN en Español that “the IMF money, which is the money of other countries, we used to pay the commercial banks that wanted to leave because “They were afraid that Kirchnerism would return.”
Independent evaluation
To carry out the required internal investigation, the deputies ask that Argentina demand the intervention of the Independent Evaluation Office (OEI), an agency of the IMF itself that carries out objective and independent evaluations of the policies and operations of that international organization, acting “with independence of the Management and the executive board of the institution.”
Among the grounds for the request, Topo Rodríguez and Natalia de la Sota cite reports from the General Auditor’s Office of the Nation and the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic, as well as an official statement from the IMF dated December 2021, with the results of the called “Ex Post Evaluation” of the 2018 Stand By with Argentina, which had already been significantly critical.
Additionally, the importance of this statement is to have stated that many IMF directors, representing different countries, considered that the intervention of the Independent Evaluation Office could have complemented the conclusions of the aforementioned Ex Post Evaluation.
The legislators’ request comes at a time when the Fund’s technical staff must evaluate the evolution of the Argentine economy and agree with the national authorities on possible modifications to the ongoing program, given the non-compliance that the country has been experiencing. It is estimated that the talks will resume at the end of the month, once the runoff has been resolved.