The judge in the expropriation case of energy company YPF ordered Argentina to hand over communications of former and current Economy Ministers Sergio Massa and Luis Caputo last week.

On Tuesday, the country’s defense requested two conferences for reconsideration of the court’s order, which aimed for Argentina to “collect and produce communications and documents from personal devices, personal email accounts, and personal messaging applications of certain senior current and former Republic officials.”

The plaintiffs, the Burford Capital hedge fund, which won the US$16.1 billion case in a New York court in 2023, had requested the information amid a “discovery” to find out the country’s seizable assets.

The case could be traced back to 2012, when Argentina’s Congress expropriated 51% of YPF shares from Spanish multinational Repsol, which was the majority shareholder at the time, giving the state majority control of the company.

Three years later, Burford Capital bought the right to litigate in the name of Petersen Energia Inversora and Petersen Energía, two companies belonging to the local Ezkenazi family that owned part of the remaining shares. Burford and Eton Park, a defunct U.S. investment firm that was also a minority shareholder, took Argentina to court in 2015 and 2016, claiming the country had failed to make a tender offer to buy their YPF shares when it nationalized the company, incurring significant losses for them as a result. 

In September 2023, Preska ordered Argentina to pay the plaintiffs US$16.1 billion for breach of contract during the nationalization — the expropriation case is on appeal. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit must now rule on the case, and it could ultimately land in the U.S. Supreme Court.

At a July 15 conference between the parties, Burford had raised the so-called “WhatsApp issue” — “the use of personal devices and/or non-governmental applications to conduct official business” — and requested the chat histories. 

In the case of minister Luis Caputo, they asked for his communications, as Argentina has not provided information on the Central Bank’s gold reserves, which the fund seeks to seize as partial payment for the lawsuit.

In a Tuesday letter addressed to the case’s judge, Loretta Preska, Argentina argued that, when ordering the country to collect the communications, the court ignored that the national law considers that public officials’ devices and accounts are the exclusive property of their owners. The country accessing them, Argentina argued, would be a crime under Articles 153 and 153 bis of the Criminal Code.

In the discovery hearings, Burford also requested information on Argentina’s commercial transactions in the United States and foreign countries, movable assets in the U.S. valued above a disputed threshold, assets in Argentina, SWIFT Messages for transactions between Argentina’s U.S. and national accounts, among others.

There are other open fronts in the lawsuit.

In June, Preska ordered Argentina to hand over 51% of the company shares it possesses. A spokesperson for Argentina’s Treasury Prosecution Office, which is leading the case, told the Herald that next week, there will likely be news on whether the Court of Appeals has granted the country a stay on that order. On September 25, both parties will file the briefs for the formal appeal of the turnover order, and on the week of October 27, the first hearing to begin addressing the appeal on the merits of Preska’s entire ruling will be held.

In February, an NGO called Republican Action for Argentina (RA4ARG) attempted to join the YPF case and requested a stay, arguing that the nationalized shares were previously obtained through corruption, but Preska denied the motion the following month. The NGO appealed and, on Wednesday, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the NGO’s request, arguing that RA4ARG “has not made a showing that a stay or remand is warranted”.

On Monday, Argentina had requested RA4ARG’s appeal to be kept separate from the country’s pending appeal in the case. In that letter, Argentina said that the NGO raised “serious allegations of corruption” related to the Eskenazi family, which, according to it, obtained the shares by being the frontmen for former President Néstor Kirchner and his wife, then-President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.

“The Republic was able to take only limited discovery in Petersen relating to the Eskenazis and their acquisition of YPF shares, and would welcome receiving any evidence that RA4ARG may have supported its allegations that the family engaged in corruption when acquiring their YPF shares,” Argentina’s defense wrote in its letter.

Updated on August 8, 2025, to reflect that the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected RA4ARG’s stay request