The banks in Uruguay are preparing to face, next year, the plebiscite promoted by Open Town Hall (CA) to restructure the debts of natural persons and limit what it considers “usury” of financial entities.
The force led by the senator Guido Manini Ríos last week, he reached 70,000 signatures in his campaign to reach a plebiscite for the bill of debt restructuring ahead of next year’s elections.
This way, Town meeting collected, in less than two months of campaigning, 25% of the 270,000 signatures that must be presented to the Electoral Court before April 27, 2024, so that the consultation can be held together with the general elections next October.
The banking sector assumes that the lobbyists will obtain the signatures required to call the popular consultation, according to the weekly Busqueda, but they are confident that the proposal will be rejected in the plebiscite.
To do this, the banks are counting on the fact that most of the political spectrum will not support the initiative due to “international evidence” that proves that it is disadvantageous to legislate around debt restructuring and interest rate limits.
In the Uruguayan banking system, they consider that institutions should not be required by law to refinance their clients since they are already willing to do so voluntarily. They warn, meanwhile, that the usury limit that Town meeting wants to join the Constitution withdraw credit.
Given the success of the collection of signatures, Town meeting will deepen its campaign to collect signatures within Uruguay and will add, in the short term, advertising campaigns and tours. In turn, the deputy Alvaro Perrone He anticipated that they will add “real testimonies with Uruguayans who suffer from extreme debt and who have no solution.”
The initiative, which seeks to modify article 52 of the Constitution, establishes the “prohibition of usury”, and sets “the maximum interest for all concepts at an Annual Effective Rate of 30% on the amounts converted to Indexed Units (UI)“. In turn, it indicates penalties against the “contraveners” of the measures and adds that “no one may be deprived of their freedom for debts.”
In Uruguay there are more than 700,000 people classified as debtors with difficulty in their ability to pay, according to the Credit Risk Center (CRC) of the Central Bank of Uruguay (BCU) which, as of May, had 1,905,155 people in the country registered as debtors.
Source: Ambito
