by Facundo Iglesia and Valen Iricibar

In an apparent communications upset, the government announced that Argentina’s mint would be shut down before quickly backtracking and providing no further information. Presidential Spokesman Manuel Adorni caused a media uproar on Tuesday with a since-deleted post on X: “It has been decided that the mint will be closed. The end.” 

There has been no official announcement or disambiguation since that post. 

There was already speculation that the mint could be shut down when it appeared in a list of companies destined for the chopping block with President Javier Milei’s original Bases Law. Rumors intensified when at the end of September, the Argentine Central Bank selected the Chinese state-owned mint to print the AR$20,000 bills in a private bidding process. The Argentine mint was not included as a bidder.

Argentina’s mint is a state-owned company called Casa de la Moneda which depends on the Economy Ministry, which told the Herald it was not responsible for the rumors about the alleged closure plans.

The Buenos Aires Graphic Federation, the union representing workers for the mint, said in a communiqué last week that there was an ongoing “hollowing out process.”

“Unfortunately, the state company is semi-paralyzed and isn’t fulfilling its basic objectives for which it was created almost a century and a half ago,” said the statement. It also claimed that three bids by the Central Bank to print banknotes had specifically excluded Argentina’s mint.

On August 23, the Central Bank started a private bid which closed on September 26. The Chinese state-owned China Banknote Printing and Minting Corporation, which manufactures all renminbi coins and banknotes, offered to do the job for US$11.5 million for 240,000 bills to be used from March to April and US$14.7 million for other 300,000 between May and July. The total cost will be US$26.2 million.

The other four bidders did not present offers for the first tranche of the job and their offers for the second ranged from US$16.9 million to US$25.2 million.

The Brazilian mint, the state-owned Casa da Moeda do Brasil also bid. The others were the French Oberthur Fiduciaire SAS, the Maltese Crane Currency Malta Limited, and the British De la Rue International Limited.

The Central Bank snubbed the Casa de la Moneda because it looked for the best price and it is not obliged to hire the state-owned company, the Herald could learn. Two sources close to the matter said the mint has debts with suppliers and therefore cannot work properly. In 2023, the mint had a AR$422.8 billion deficit: 70% of that debt was allegedly due to investing in new machinery, including a new production line.

Argentina’s mint not only prints banknotes and mints coins. It also prints passports, cigarette tags, university degrees, and others. Should the government bar it from printing new banknoted, it would not necessarily mean that the state-owned company would shut down completely.

UPCN, a union grouping state workers, released a communiqué on Wednesday saying that the Casa de la Moneda president told them that his state-owned company would not shut down, and that it would “continue to work in searching customers and reducing the organism’s debts.”