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This will be Mileis first privatization. The pride of the industry, it was nationalized during Kirchnerism.
The first privatization of the Javier Milei government will not be any of the eight companies authorized for the entry of private capital that appear in the already approved text of Bases II. The first important change of the transfer of shares of a company with a public majority to a private investor, and probably the first process of the Incentive Regime for Large Investments (RIGI), will be the operation by which Industrias Metalúrgicas Pescarmona Sociedad Anónima (Impsa) will have a new owner. Surely, with foreign capital. The report indicates that the main interested party is ARC Energy, a company with American capital dedicated to the production, provision and services of oil and gas inputs, which will channel the investment through the American Investment Fund (IAF). And probably, as the investment must exceed US$ 500 million (only for the payment of debts) it will claim the benefits of the RIGI. The process began last week, and for thirty days offers that compete with the IAF can be presented. The winner will have seven days to make the offer official and will have to wait another sixty days to find an improvement. If there is none, it will keep Impsa.
This will mark the beginning of a new era for the company, which was once the most brilliant symbol of the national industry and then entered into a whirlwind of decadence, to the rhythm of the distrust between the nation and the businessmen. A new era in this relationship could also begin. We will see.
It is a good time to analyze the Impsa metaphor, a symbol of the country and its business class.
The company was founded by Enrique Epaminondas Pescarmona, a Turin native who emigrated to Mendoza to accompany a sister who was getting married in that province. The beginnings date back to 1907 with the opening of the Pescarmona Metallurgical Workshops in Godoy Cruz, where metal gates for the wine industry were manufactured. With his children already working in the workshops, Pescarmona Hermanos y Compañía was opened in 1936. He died in 1947 and his children continued with the company and in 1965 Impsa was founded, an essential process for the international expansion of the company; which began to advance globally by winning public tenders around the world. Luis Menotti Pescarmona took over the leadership and Impsa expanded to South America and Central America, the USA, Europe and Asia and had a workforce of more than 3,000 employees worldwide. He was succeeded by his son Enrique Menotti Pescarmona, grandson of Epaminondas, thus consolidating the third family generation at the head of the company, which had already become a holding company with worldwide reach. In those days of the 70s and 80s, Impsa was the great pride of the countrys industry. It weathered the problematic 90s and faced the post-convertibility period with positive expectations. It was a heavy steel company, and the high exchange rate always favoured it. But, curiously, it also began its time of crisis as a private Argentine industrial company.
On December 18, 2005, Enrique Pescarmona declared that the economy would grow by 8%, because “there is a productive exchange rate, the international markets are favorable for commodities and Roberto Lavagna did a great job, although his departure from the ministry will not change things.” He praised Néstor Kirchner, assuring that the president “has it clear because he handles the numbers” and because “it is the first time in the last fifty years that Argentina has had a trade and fiscal surplus for four consecutive years, despite inflationary pressures.”
Impsa represents a symbol of Argentina and the relationship between its business class and governments
January 18, 2008 was a day of hope and optimism for Impsa. After years of lobbying, and believing he knew where the winds were coming from, Enrique Pescarmona managed to get his company to sign a US$520 million contract in Venezuela to supply turbines for the Tocoma hydroelectric project. It would be the “jewel” project of Hugo Chávez’s regime and the crowning achievement of the smiling meeting between the Argentine and Venezuelan governments, together with the country’s private industrialists. There was talk in those days of the consecration of the idea of ??the “Latin American bourgeoisie,” with Argentine businessmen as the flagship and the contract for Tocoma as the first step of a ladder that would be endless.
Chávez presented to the region the formula by which 21st century socialism, in some way, coexisted gloriously with private companies that knew how to understand which way the winds were blowing.
In Buenos Aires, the government displayed a letter in which Impsa claimed that it was the “largest high-tech export contract” in Argentine history. Impsa had won the contract in an international public tender that began in 2004, in which the American General Electric, the French Alstom, the German Siemens, the Japanese Marubeni, Sumitomo, Hitachi and Mitsui, the Austrian Vatech and the Chinese Dong Fang and Harbin also competed. Impsa had beaten them all, demonstrating that for Bolivarian Venezuela, no multinational’s CV was of any use when it came to awarding a multi-million dollar deal.
The contract implied that Impsa would provide turbines and generators for the Tocoma plant, which would require an investment of US$ 3.061 million. “It is a source of pride for national technology to design, manufacture, transport and assemble these large hydraulic machines that will be designed in our country,” Pescarmona wrote in the letter signed by the businessman himself.
It was all about celebration. All the good things of those days were brought together in one act: Bolivarian integration, the private sector playing along, and Latin Americas greatness. It was not to be. On September 16, 2014, Impsa became the first private company to announce that it would not be able to meet its external financial commitments, after Argentina entered into "technical" default on July 30.
The bank did so in a letter to the National Securities Commission, where it acknowledged that it would not be able to meet the expected interest payments of US$42 million and US$23 million. These are class X and XI negotiable obligations, as well as the payment of capital and interest on all its outstanding negotiable obligations and with financial creditors. The government immediately confirmed that it was studying a rescue plan for the company.
Impsas explanations were simple. The company had not been able to gain a foothold in the expansion of public works within the country due to the lack of international credit and the closure of international markets because of Argentinas poor image in the world, and, in addition, Venezuela had not fulfilled the promised payments.
By that time, Enrique Menotti Pescarmona had lost control of the company, and by 2018 the group of creditors, led by the Inter-American Development Bank, Banco Nación and a Chilean investment fund, among others, took over two of three directors and marked the departure of the powerful businessman. He would continue to be in the news that year but for another reason: he ended up being repentant in the payment of bribes in the Cuadernos case, after the arrest of Rodolfo Valenti, one of the companys managers and a trusted man of the businessman. He admitted that his company had paid the Ministry of Planning US$ 2.98 million in "improper concepts."
The company was renationalized on June 4, 2021, in a curious alliance between the government of Alberto Fernández and that of Mendoza of Rodolfo Suárez. The Nation would hold 63.7% of the shares and the province 21.2%. Three years later, the process began in reverse. A metaphor for a country that has not yet decided what type of model to defend. |
