The Rural Society responded to a Milei official who accused it of "sabotage" against the Hydroway tender

The suspension of the bidding for the Paraná River Hydroway is still having repercussions. After the executive director of the National Ports and Navigation Agency, Iñaki Arreseygor, pointed the finger at Mauricio Macri and Nicolás Pino, president of the Rural Society, for " sabotaging" the bidding, the agricultural entity came out to disassociate itself from the accusations.

In a message posted on the Rural Society's social media and replicated by Pino, the entity stated: " We categorically deny the false accusations against the President of the entity, Nicolás Pino , where they indicate that he was one of those 'responsible' for causing the tender to award the exploitation of the Hydroway to fail."

The organization recalled that they have brought their "opinions and comments" to all the meetings they held with government officials with the aim of "reducing production costs and resolving issues that affect the competitiveness of the sector, as we have been doing for 159 years."

"In our entity we never act in favor or against a particular company," they emphasized. The Government had cancelled the tender for the Hydroway - formally called Dredging of the Main Navigable Route (VNT) of the Paraguay and Paraná rivers, after only one company submitted a bid.

The Rural Society acknowledged that the issue of the bidding for the Hydroway "was discussed during the last meeting that the Liaison Committee had with Minister Luis Caputo and other national authorities." And it clarified that it made its technicians available to "help the bidding process develop better."

From the Argentine Rural Society we categorically deny the false accusations against the President of the entity, @NicolasPinoSRA , where they indicate that he was one of those "responsible" for causing the failure of the tender to award the exploitation of the Hydroway.

Continuously…

— Rural Society (@SociedadRural) February 25, 2025

" We hope that a new call for tenders will be issued as soon as possible, allowing several companies to compete on equal terms. If this is the case, this should result in a lower tariff for producers to the benefit of Argentine production," they concluded in the message.

The accusation of alleged sabotage was mentioned by Arreseygor in a meeting before the Transport Commission of the Chamber of Deputies days ago. He maintained that Macri, his former Minister of Transport, Guillermo Dietrich, and the head of the Rural Society, Nicolás Pino, had headed a lobby to bring down the competition.

Arreseygor told the commission that "members of politics and businessmen coordinated to make this bidding process fail." In this regard, he spoke of a "rain of media operations."

"A perfect job and coordination of these actors who had no interest in this going ahead and who were only interested in turning this procedure around so that if these actors returned to an executive function they could end up assigning this contract to one side or the other," added the official from Javier Milei.

The deputies asked him to say who were the ones who supposedly conspired against the tender. "I have to return the courtesies: the former minister Dietrich, of course the former president Mauricio Macri," he replied, while later he also mentioned the president of the Rural Society, Nicolás Pino.

Arreseygor made these statements in a commission of Deputies, after the Government declared the tender void on February 12 and announced an investigation against Dredging Environmental and Marine Engineering NV (DEME), which from the beginning pointed out an alleged bias in favor of the Belgian company Jan de Nul, the previous licensee of the concession until 2021.

"It is striking that the only company that came forward was the one that pushed accusations of direction," said Manuel Adorni, presidential spokesman.