The federal board overseeing Puerto Rico's financial rehabilitation is enlarging the U.S. territory's court-supervised bankruptcy, placing its nearly depleted pension system and its transportation agency under court protection, MarketWatch reported yesterday. The Employees Retirement System (ERS) and the Highways and Transportation Authority (HTA) entered a debt-restructuring process that amounts to municipal bankruptcy in the federal court in San Juan. "This is part of a court-supervised process within a framework that provides for an orderly restructuring of the debt of each entity and allows as much creditor consensus as possible," said a spokesman for Puerto Rico's fiscal agency. ERS owes $3 billion to bondholders. The highway agency owes roughly $6.3 billion in debt, including $1.8 billion to Puerto Rico's insolvent industrial development bank, according to the oversight board.
