Cash-strapped Argentina intends to impose an emergency tax on large firms to raise some 1.2 billion dollars to aid the poor, according to press reports today, citing President Eduardo Duhalde.
President Duhalde explained that "a one-time tax will be applied to those large companies that benefited from the recent pesofication" of the economy, the daily
La Nacion
reported.
The money is to be used to help the country's growing numbers of unemployed, who have taken to the streets to protest economic conditions here.
Through the measures, the government is seeking to end protests by the unemployed and by bank account holders, who have led a series of noisy demonstrations to protest the government's freeze on bank accounts and subsequent conversion to pesos of their dollar bank deposits.
Economy Minister Mr Jorge Remes Lenicov is to send the tax proposal, aimed at companies who held more than three million dollars of debt that was then converted into pesos, to Congress on Monday.
Crisis-hit Argentina is struggling to cope with belt-tightening policies to win further IMF loans to help pull the country out of recession and renegotiate its debt following its January default on some 141 billion dollars owed to creditors.
On Friday, President Duhalde told Congress that the South American nation had lost 20 billion dollars in reserves in 2001, while the number of the nation's poor had risen to 15 million.
Some 37 million people live in Argentina.
AFP