The Senate voted unanimously on a request that the Executive power stop the auctions and notices of regularization to the debtors of the Mortgage Bank of Uruguay (BHU) while discussing in Parliament the bill that proposes a solution for the more than 20,000 families that find themselves in this situation.
The initiative was promoted by the senator of the Colorado Party, Germán Coutinho —who is also one of the drafters of the government project that is being discussed at the parliamentary level—, with the aim of gaining time for debate. “The important thing is to suspend the auctions so that we can work calmly on the final solution of the issue,” said the legislator of the National Party, Sergio Botana.
“We seek that the Executive have the initiative to suspend the auctions”, indicated Botana, who considered that the measure could benefit 24,000 families. “It would be an injustice for these people who have been held hostage all their lives to lose their home when there is so little left for the solution,” she said.
As stated by the senator in the Housing Commission last week, the measure already has the support of the president Luis Lacalle Pou, with whom the colorado would have talked beforehand. “We are formalizing a minute so that it is known that in this process there was a positive policy response of the executive branch,” he said. The government is the one that has exclusive power in this sense.
For his part, and with Senator Oscar Andrade as representative, the broad front He supported Coutinho’s proposal, while “it would be absurd for a person to be evicted this week who could have, according to the law, the status of owner of the property next month,” he said.
A project that hardly sees the light
Meanwhile, the project approached by the red Coutinho together with the nationalists Sergio Botana and Carlos Camy It seems that it will not have much of a future, not because of the debt restructuring plan that it proposes, but because of the merger that it proposes between the Republic Bank (BROU) and the BHU. Or, rather, the absorption of the latter by the former.
In this sense, the approval of this point requires a special majority in Parliament, that is, two thirds of the positive votes; an amount that would not reach, since even sectors of the government would not seem to be convinced with the proposal.
Among the voices against is the bank in question itself, which threatened massive demonstrations if the project is approved. For the president of the BHU, Casilda Echevarria, the bank “has the possibility, due to its patrimonial responsibility, to bear the impact” of the application of the initiative, “without the need to join Banco República”.
For his part, the director for the Broad Front of the BHU, Gabriel Frugoni, considered that a merger with BROU would take years and would imply a “loss of credibility”. In addition, he alerted for a “contagion effect” that could encourage other debtors not included in the project to try to achieve write-offs through the courts.
Various personalities of the political arc They were also against the merger of these banks, among them, the Minister of Housing and Territorial Planning (MVOT), Raul Lozano. Despite having been one of the senators who participated in the elaboration of the project in question, he rejected the fact that the idea of the merger or absorption of the BHU was included since, from his political strength, Town meetingIt is not in the plans for the state bank to disappear.
While, the opposition also made itself heard through Senator Mario Bergara, who assured that “there are no foundations” to consider the government proposal that seeks to merge these two banks as a solution to the problem of debtors in Indexed Units (UI) of the BHU.
According to Bergara, the proposal “fell from the sky without anyone discussing it before” and did not go through “any study”. “In parliamentary jargon, when the Executive Branch sends a billsends it with a statement of reasons”, he slipped.
The Association of Bank Employees of Uruguay (AEBU), for his part, he also rejected that the project includes the merger of both banking entities.
Source: Ambito
