Lacunza received the IMF | First contact of the flaman …

Finance Minister Hernán Lacunza confirmed to the IMF mission headed by Roberto Cardarelli that Argentina would reach the budget targets set in the stand-by agreement. The official, accompanied by part of his team and the president of the Central Bank, Guido Sandleris, received this Saturday the delegation of the Fund, arrived in the country Friday, to start evaluating the results of the second quarter. Lacunza estimated that the conditions are met for the payment planned by the agency to be about $ 5,400 million in September.

Alejandro Werner, director of the IMF's Western Hemisphere Department, and the local organizer's office, Trevor Alleyne, attended the meeting. The meeting served as a presentation to Lacunza, who was appointed to this post just a week ago, amid a financial and monetary imbalance that resulted in a 30% appreciation of the dollar in a weekend and book losses for more than $ 7 billion in recent weeks. Despite these circumstances and the situation of instability and turbulence can not be considered resolved, Mr. Lacunza told the IMF delegates that Argentina would have no difficulty in meeting the objectives. set in the economic program committed to the organization, despite the measures of "Relief" raised after the primary elections (STEP) of August 11, strongly opposed to the government.

The IMF's technical team plans to meet with presidential candidate Frente de Todos, Alberto Fernández, on Monday, and to establish contacts during the week with candidates Roberto Lavagna and José Luis Espert.

The former director of the IMF's Western Hemisphere, Claudio Loser, speculated on Saturday that "the economic team has surely urged" that the IMF delegation come so soon in the country. Loser pointed out that at the IMF "they had Dujovne as Minister of Economy and knew him very well, while Lacunza is not a well-known character and in this sense, of course, the people of Funds worry about it, but they are not going to make institutional differences. "

With regard to the so-called "recovery measures" that the national government has taken in response to the very hard blow that it suffered during the elections on Sunday, August 11, Loser said that in fiscal terms "the economic measures taken are not too big", But warned that doubts are not about the goals. "The goals of July have been achieved, the problem is coming," said the IMF official against the 39, Argentina in 2001, which also stated that it "would bet that the Fund will be disbursed".

Marco Lavagna, economist of the Federal Consensus, president of his father's presidential candidate Roberto Lavagna, said that the agreement with the IMF should be rejected and that a new agreement must be reached. "In practice, it is down," he said, indicating that the country would not respect the commitments made. "We will have to renegotiate the winner of the elections," he said, "at this point, inflation should fall and the interest rate should be much lower with a growing economy: everything is at l & # 39; reverse. " "I hope the IMF will pay the $ 5,400 million because it would be a very bad sign that this is not the case. You see that in the future, it's an agreement that needs to be thrown out and create a new one, "he concluded.