Senator Guido Manini Ríos pointed out that they have 95.3% of the necessary signatures and intends for the ballot “For a fair debt” to be voted on in November.
The senator and leader of Open Town Hall, Guido Manini Ríos, announced that the official political space failed to gather the 276,332 signatures necessary to present this Saturday to the Electoral Court and move forward with plebiscite “By a debt fair.”
The “rebel party” of the Republican Coalition It has 95.3% of the signatures, according to Manini Ríos, who redoubled the bet by pointing out that he aims to present the ballot before the Court on May 24, with the aim of having it voted together with an eventual runoff, on November 24, and not in the next departmental elections, the second option that was being considered in recent weeks.
The legislator called a press conference to communicate the decision, where he specified that CA collected 263,723 signatures. “Signatures continue to be received from the interior and this number will probably increase in the last hours, but we are not going to present them because we would be exposed to any ruling by the Court rendering a very important plebiscite void,” he revealed.
Thinking about the future, the presidential candidate for space pointed out that by May 24 they will gather “a cushion” to avoid any inconvenience, with the goal of “convening the plebiscite with the Second round”.
He even dared to venture that “we are going to spend that amount of 300,000 signatures that we proposed at some point” and questioned the rest of the political parties by remembering: “We started in August 2023 because we wasted 4 months at the beginning waiting for them to make serious proposals to us to go for a law.”
Manini Ríos Open Town Hall
Photo: AFP
The banks’ view of the Open Town Council proposal
The banking sector of Uruguay always had in the calculations that Town meeting would obtain the signatures to promote the plebiscite, since the country has 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.
In any case, the banks believe that the proposal will be rejected by citizens, relying on “international evidence” that proves the disadvantages of legislating around debt restructuring and interest rate limits.
The initiative aims to modify article 52 of the Constitution and establish the “prohibition of usury”, setting “the maximum interest for all concepts at an Annual Effective Rate of 30% on the amounts converted to Indexed Units (UI)“, while proposing penalties against the “contraveners” of the measures and pointing out that “no one may be deprived of their freedom for debts.”
However, the banking system clarified that institutions should not be required by law to refinance their clients, something they do voluntarily. They even warned that the usury limit that raises CA will retract the credit.
Source: Ambito
