Puerto Rico’s Senate plans to take up legislation today that would exclude bonds used to restructure public-corporation debt from the island’s moratorium law, Bloomberg News reported yesterday. The upper chamber is set to take up the measure passed by the House of Representatives last week, Senate President Eduardo Bhatia said yesterday. The Senate will change the House bill so general-obligation and sales-tax bonds would still be subject to the debt-moratorium law, Bhatia said. Governor Alejandro Garcia Padilla has said that the commonwealth needs the ability to skip payments on both classes of securities. Assets and revenue of municipalities and local cooperatives would be protected from the moratorium. A deal that would restructure about $9 billion of Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority debt would also be exempt from the moratorium law, Bhatia said. Read more.
For more news and analysis of Puerto Rico's debt crisis, be sure to visit ABI's "Puerto Rico in Distress" webpage.
