A colossal lawsuit against YPF for $ 14 billion

The state oil company YPF faces a new conflict in the Justice of United States, where they seek to take charge of the environmental damage caused by the company Maxus in the decades of 50 and 60 in this country and claim the colossal figure of 14 billion dollars more than double its stock market value.

"The cause is not for the environmental damage caused by YPF.When we bought Maxus, the company that had contaminated was not over Maxus", warned of the state oil company before consulting this newspaper.

The application was made to the US District of Delaware Bankruptcy Court, as part of the dissolution of the company Maxus Energy Corporation which YPF purchased in 1995 (for $ 762 million) and this results in a historic claim for environmental damage.

To understand how the demand comes up to YPF, the complex business framework must be broken: everything began in the middle of the last century, in the factory of pesticides Diamond Alkali in Newark, New Jersey. There, according to the civil complaint filed by the local state, carcinogenic products were dumped into the Pbadaic River between the 1950s and 1960s.

There is a specific mention of Dioxin one of the largest pollutants in the world, which in the facilities of Diamond Alkali used to make the defoliant Agent Orange, chemical than the US troops threw in the Vietnam War.

Over time Diamond Alkali was renamed Diamond Shamrock and was acquired by Tierra Solutions, a subsidiary of Maxus. In the 1980s, Maxus sold it to Occidental Petroleum Corporation (Oxy) . The complaint for contamination was resolved in 2012, when the Court ruled against Maxus and Tierra.

And history added a new chapter when Oxy claimed the bankruptcy of Maxus to retake the fine that United States Environmental Protection Agency applied for clean up the Pbadaic River . The cost of cleaning was officially estimated at about 261 million dollars per kilometer.

Finally, the Liquidation Trust of Maxus Energy Corporation ( in charge of the bankruptcy process initiated by the YPF authorities in June 2016) decided to transfer the responsibility to the Argentine national oil company.

Through a statement that they sent to the Stock Exchange, since YPF they badured "that they did not cause any environmental contamination badociated with the Pbadaic River located in New Jersey or elsewhere related to the said acquisition ".

At YPF, the news was announced last Wednesday, when notifications reached two of its subsidiaries YPF Holdings and CLH Holdings . The claim now rises to $ 14 billion and industry experts have warned that the figure is "laughable", taking into account the fact that the financial value of the company State does not exceed 6,000 million dollars.

Now, the Argentine company has announced that, if it is validly notified, it will defend "any charge that the corporate transactions referred to in the claim, which were conducted in accordance with the rules of government of. company and other applicable regulations, hold YPF liable to Maxus or his creditors ".

This multi-million dollar lawsuit is against YPF, in addition to that of the Burford Fund claiming approximately $ 3 billion ] for the expropriation of the oil company.

A New York court ruled in early July of this year that this process should continue in United States and not in Argentina. In this way, the government's efforts to import the cause and define it in the local justice system were left without effect.

Bolivia claims debt for the purchase of gas

was unleashed between Bolivia and Argentina for a debt of 256 million Buenos Aires Government Dollars for Bolivian Gas and for New Volumes Requested by the Buenos Aires Government .

The president of the Bolivian oil company YPFB, Oscar Barriga, claimed that Argentina "is not complying with stipulated payment commitments" in a contract to buy and sell gas and that the Argentine public company Enarsa owes more than 256 million dollars. said that the debt corresponds to the months of April and May last. Bolivia supplies an average of 17 to 18 million cubic meters per day of natural gas (mmcd).

"Considering that Argentina is not fulfilling its obligations and continues this situation, because YPFB will evaluate the measures to be taken, because as a public company, we have the obligation to guarantee the respect of all the contractual responsibilities, "said Barriga. ] The Argentine ambbadador, Normando Alvarez, indicated that his country would pay the debt, although he said the delay was due to the change of the corporate name of Enarsa , the Argentine energy company Energetica Argentina SA (Ieasa)

"Then some one, although it is a lie, makes all the formal changes of the corporate name and it is the main cause of the non-payment of gas in these months, "said the diplomat, interviewed in the newspaper La Razón de La Paz.

The ambbadador also confirmed that his country asked to increase gas volumes in the winter, the moment of greatest manda, although it was not no official response from Bolivia.