Thursday, April 6, 2023

How Argentine bondholders were cheated


In 2005 Argentina sold bonds linked to statistical information on Argentina's economic situation published by INDEC - the national bureau of Statistics. In later years, it became obvious that the figures of INDEC did NOT reflect reality so even the World Bank stopped using them. The University of La Plata (my alma mater) made a study about what happened, analyzing INDEC hard disks and mail, and discovered the  Ipn_Calind_Pkg.SQL program. This computer program was used to calculate the indices and contained a "top" function that, in case of reaching an undesired figure - recalculated the index so that it was more "government friendly".

Several foreign holders of Argentine indexed bonds demanded the State for falsifying the data and cheating them. The London tribunal accepted the demand and now Argentina will pay about 1.5 billion dollars.  Triste.

See https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2017/02/21/the-case-of-indec-in-argentina-shows-that-statistical-neutrality-is-an-unachievable-ideal/


No comments:

Post a Comment