The national government has recently filed a formal request with Judge Loretta Preska to suspend the discovery process and the contempt motion filed by the plaintiffs in the litigation related to YPF, according to sources from the Attorney General's Office. "The systematic harassment of a sovereign state and an ally of the United States, through intrusive and disproportionate discovery requests, directly affects Argentine sovereignty and international relations," states the document submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which was accessed by the Argentine News Agency. The discovery process is one that allows the beneficiaries of a ruling to request information and trace attachable assets to enforce the sentence. The Attorney General's Office recalled that, "during previous administrations, Argentina was held in contempt three times" and, in contrast, highlighted that "since the current government took office in December 2023, Argentina has fully complied with the discovery process ordered in this case" and "has met all the obligations imposed by the court." Likewise, they emphasized that "the Argentine State made an extraordinary effort to deliver all reasonably relevant information, with an unprecedented volume of production." In this context, they warned that, in the face of the Argentine State's compliance, "the plaintiffs escalated their demands towards increasingly legally unacceptable, invasive, costly, and completely unrelated to the purpose of the process requests." They also stated that, in recent weeks, "Burford escalated the pressure through an unjustified contempt motion and the request for information about the location of the gold reserves of the Central Bank of the Argentine Republic." In this regard, they clarified that "such reserves are the property of the Central Bank" and, as such, "are protected from execution, that is, they constitute non-executable assets, so any request for information on this matter is manifestly improper." In line with this, the Attorney General's Office affirmed that the discovery process "has been distorted and transformed into a harassment tool, intended to hinder the normal functioning of the Argentine State." They warned that "the plaintiffs have explicitly stated their objective to 'sand in the gears' of Argentina's economic recovery," a behavior they described as "legally and morally unacceptable." Finally, they reaffirmed that "the Argentine Republic will continue to exercise all legal tools at its disposal, in all available judicial instances, to protect its sovereignty, defend the rule of law, and put an end to illegitimate requests that violate its laws, its Constitution, and the basic principles of international law."
