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Protest by Italian bondholders
La Nacion
June 22, 2010

ROME.- On the eve of the theoretical final close, today, to the swap offer on debt in default, a small group of Italian bondholders no more than 15 people came back today to demonstrate their fury against the "thief Argentina" before the Argentine embassy, in front of the Piazza dell Esquilino.

Compared with what had taken place last May 18th, coinciding with the visit of Economy Minister Amado Boudou to the peninsula to convince the Italian holdouts to enter the swap offer, there were two new developments in the protest. The first, a call to boycott the purchase of Argentine products; the second, the singing of the "tango of the swindled saver", a song that, composed in 2/4 time, various Italian pensioners sang to this correspondent, in which they showed all their rage and exasperation over the "colossal swindle."

"Over there in Argentina, land of the thieves and players, a sad morning, we lend them serious money. Happy and always fat, there the thieves were laughing: 'those genial Italians are real suckers," the tango goes, which was composed by Gianluca, one of the 450,000 small investors stuck with the "tango-bonds", who came from Modena, in the center of Italy.

Like the vast majority of the small Italian investors, Gianluca an engineer who preferred not to give his last name and who yesterday, in a suit, with his laptop in hand tried to lead the others in the tango lost all his savings buying 150,000 euros in Argentine bonds at the end of the 1990s. Like him, Eugenia protested yesterday, a Roman doctor that invested a similar sum betting on the growth of the "very rich Argentine thief", and now says she is "desperate." "It's not ethical not to return money lent to you or to return a minimal part of it in the year 2038. I'll be more than 100 years old!" Eugenia said, accusing the Italian government of having abandoned her in her fight.

As with the last one, the protest was called by Gianfranco Lucifora and Orlando Masiero, leaders of COHBRA (the Holdout Bond Committee Argentine Republic) a group of holdouts indignant over the "theft" perpetrated by our country, which, at the time, were received by Boudou and his team.

"The operation is not going well. We are sure that 100,000 bondholders stayed out," Masiero said. Participating at the protest was Renzo Lusetti, an Italian member of Parliament from the UCD, an opposition party, as well as Francesco Avallone, vice president of Federconsumatori, a consumer defense group. "If Argentina had made a proposal at ten years, which came due in 2028 and not 2038, things would have been different. But there was never even a hint of negotiations, over the famous law that impedes making an offer better than the one for the 2005 swap. But that is a pretext: as you make one law, you make another," he complained to LA NACION.

Thermal sensation

During the protest, all of them spoke about the supposed extension of the swap "to the max" that the Argentine government could announce at any moment. On that, Attilio Lioi, advisor to Deputy Lusetti, said that in a meeting weeks ago, "Boudou told us that if they wanted to, they could hold the swap open until December 31st, the day that the suspension of the locked-shut law expires."

Consulted by LA NACION, Giuseppe Martini, vice president of TFA, an association that represents some 180,000 bondholders that still hold US$4.5 billion in "tango-bonds", said that they still don't have figures on the swap. While he admitted that "according to his thermometer" the sensation is that there are many more Italian investors "angered" with Argentina and that, as such, the adhesions "will not be numerous."

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