As soon as Milei won the elections, Santiago Caputo put YPF in his sights and when they took office he placed his partner Guillermo Garat as vice president. Curious that a consultant leaves a supposedly lucrative company that no less than a multinational has just won, to become manager of a semi-public company in Argentina.
But as LPO anticipated at that time, there was talk in the market that Santiago Caputo and his partners were already behind the oil company’s conventional well business. Coincident or not, in his first meeting with the press, the president of YPF, Horacio Marín, announced that he would get rid of those wells to concentrate on Vaca Muerta.
He explained that the company would begin to divest from “secondary areas”, that is, conventional wells, which in many cases continue to be enormously profitable. “It’s the old YPF,” the libertarians contemptuously stated then.
The company then activated three mechanisms to withdraw from conventional oil production: reversion of the wells to the provinces as in the tortuous case of Santa Cruz, sale by tender to bidding oil companies and a third modality that fuels suspicions.
Santiago Caputo wants to keep the conventional well business that YPF discards
This is a design aimed especially at SMEs that want to join the activity. For this, YPF offers certain benefits for the acquisition of these wells: financing from the national oil company and direct contracts that guarantee YPF’s purchase of the production of those wells. “The hand of Caputo and Garat appears,” sources familiar with the situation told LPO.
The versions of “oil companies” armed in a hurry to keep those wells fly in a company that has dragged on toxic relations since the suggestive transition with La Cámpora. The thing is that Caputo and Garat worked in Pedro’s Wado campaign, which controlled part of the oil company’s businesses.
The sale of YPF’s conventional oil wells hides a mechanism that aroused suspicion in the market, where they look at Santiago Caputo. This is the sale financed by the same company to SMEs.
The concrete thing is that YPF received offers from 60 companies to begin the process of selling 55 mature areas, which represent 60% of its conventional oil production and 40% of the gas production of the Argentine oil company. The sale, called Proyecto Andes, is being managed by Santander bank
“Today is an important day because the (purchase) proposals for the mature fields arrived. There were 60 interested companies. I have no idea of the results and I am not on the decision committee either, precisely to give transparency,” Marín said. during a toast for Journalism Day at the Puerto Madero tower.
Advisor Santiago Caputo, leader of the libertarian Peaky Blinders.
At that meeting, the company promised to publish the list of bidding companies, but the truth is that ten days after the announcement, YPF still had not announced the interested firms.
Suspicion about possible business deals by the group led by Santiago Caputo based on the sale of conventional areas was sparked by the review of YPF’s balance sheets in March of this year. The new management of YPF reported a loss of 1,277 million dollars, compared to the 2,234 million dollars of profits signed by the outgoing president Pablo Gonzalez. The company assured that this collapse was “generated mainly by a provision for asset depreciation.”
YPF leadership lowered the value of the wells it put up for sale by more than $1.2 billion. Rare to lower the price of a good just before selling it.
Strictly speaking, what the company’s board of directors did was cut $1.8 billion from the valuation of the 55 conventional areas that are for sale. Rare to lower the price of a good just before selling it.
The company responded that it did not seek to favor potential buyers, but rather that the price of areas that were overvalued was being “honest.”
