Argentina’s biggest brokerage weighs local IPO

Bloomberg

Puente Hnos SA, the largest local brokerage in Argentina, is weighing selling shares of its UK holding company in Buenos Aires before the end of the year.
The company is still considering an initial public offering in New York or London, Federico Tomasevich, Puente’s global chairman, said in an interview. Selling the securities in Argentina is preferred because a US offering may prove too expensive and there’s limited appetite for Latin American companies in the UK, he said.
“We would be a much bigger force in the Argentina stock market,” Tomasevich said in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay. “But we are analyzing whether we can list our holding company in Buenos Aires. The Argentine bourse is booming, it’s about to enter the MSCI and there isn’t enough paper available.”
Puente is betting that the recent tax amnesty in Argentina, which may have attracted as much as $115 billion in undeclared assets, will fuel a boom in money management for Argentines who have hidden their savings in cash or foreign assets for decades. The amnesty ends Friday. Argentina may see as much as $1 billion in inflows if MSCI Inc. adds the nation to its emerging-market indexes, JPMorgan Chase & Co. said in February.
“We are going to have a disruptive advantage in Argentina with all the money that is coming in from the tax amnesty,” he said.