Milei government to auction off more than 400 state properties across Argentina

President Javier Milei’s government will auction off more than 400 state buildings across Argentina, hoping to raise US$800 million in the process.

Argentina’s property management agency “is going to auction more than 400 properties and put another 800 properties up for sale, with the sole objective of reducing unnecessary expenses,” Presidential Spokesman Manuel Adorni announced at a press conference Friday.

“It is estimated that these properties have a total estimated value of US$800 million,” he added.

Adorni said that one of the buildings for sale will be the former headquarters of the former Women, Gender & Diversity Ministry, which Milei downgraded soon after taking office. Located in the San Telmo neighbourhood of the capital, it is valued at some US$12.5 million.

Arguing that today the building is useless, Adorni repeated how Milei got rid of the portfolio, introduced by former president Alberto Fernández in 2019, upon taking office. 

The La Libertad Avanza leader, who said that he closed the ministry, in fact turned it into a sub-secretariat of the Justice Ministry and renamed it

Adorni also announced that a government decree banning “hereditary positions” in the civil service will be published next Monday.

The practice in some state agencies, which is included in some collective-bargaining agreements, is to give preference when recruiting new staff, under certain conditions, to the immediate family members of a deceased employee.

This was the case, for example, at the Central Bank, where preference was sometimes given to the spouse or child of a deceased employee.

This rule was repealed in 2018 by a decree issued by then-president Mauricio Macri, but the board of the Central Bank reinstated and defended it in 2022 during the Fernández government.

“These hangovers of blood privileges, these mediaeval hangovers … persist in strata of the Argentine public sector,” said Deregulation & State Transformation Minister Federico Sturzenegger at the same press conference. 

Sturzenegger first entered government as a secretary at the Economy Ministry in 2001 and later served as a national deputy and the heads of both the Central Bank and Banco Ciudad.

Milei appointed him earlier this year as deregulation czar, tasked with cutting bureaucracy and red tape.

The Milei administration did not give an estimate of how many “hereditary” jobs currently exist in the civil service.

– TIMES/AFP