YPF and Government hostile take overs

As they say, when it rains….Spain doesn’t need this, but such is life. Argentina is just only taking what belongs to the country, or? What’s next, governments taking your gold and giving you freshly printed pesetas for it? From El Pais on the latest out of Argentina.

After weeks of speculation, Argentinean President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner announced on Monday that her government is going to nationalize the Spanish Repsol subsidiary YPF, declaring that her country’s hydrocarbon industry was a sector of “public interest.”

In a speech made in Buenos Aires after returning from the Americas Summit in Colombia, Fernández de Kirchner explained that she will send a law to Congress that proposed giving 51 percent control of YPF to the federal government and the remaining 49 percent to the country’s provinces.

In the coming days, the country’s appraisers will decide how much it will reimburse YPF for its shares.

“When one makes decisions in the interests of national management […] one also expects that managers understand the interests of the state,” Fernández de Kirchner said.

“We are the only country in America and one of the few in the world that doesn’t manage its own natural resources, but there were stronger arguments in favor of us taking this decision,” she said.