Argentina Nationalized Aerolíneas Argentinas—18 Years Later, A U.S. Court Says It Owes $391 Million

Argentina nationalized Aerolíneas Argentinas and sister carrier Austral in 2008. Eighteen years later, investors are still trying to collect $391 million. The country argues they waited too long to come after the money in the United States.

The airlines had been controlled by Spanish conglomerate Grupo Marsans. Government airfare price controls and labor disputes continued to the decline of the airline. But the confiscation of the carrier violated treaties.

The investors went to the World Bank’s International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes. A divided arbitration tribunal ruled in 2017 that Argentina had unlawfully expropriated the airlines. It awarded $320.76 million, legal costs and interest. Argentina tried to have the decision annulled, but lost.

The claim then became a tradable asset. Litigation finance firm Burford Capital had invested $12.8 million in the case and sold its interest for $107 million to Titan Consortium. Titan is now trying to collect.

With interest, a federal district court entered judgment against Argentina in December 2024 for $390,907,115.55, plus additional interest after judgment. However, Argentina argues Titan waited too long to enforce the award in the United States.

There’s an odd hole in federal law. The statute requiring U.S. courts to enforce World Bank arbitration awards never included a statute of limitations. Congress may have just forgotten to say how long an award holder has to file. Courts need to borrow a deadline from some other law.

• Argentina says the closest comparison is the three-year limit used for enforcing other international arbitration awards. Titan filed in Washington four years and one month after the original award, so Argentina says the case came too late.

• Titan says these particular awards are legally treated like final court judgments, not ordinary arbitration awards, and those generally allow 12 years.

A unanimous federal appeals court agreed with Titan. The law governing ordinary arbitration expressly doesn’t apply to these World Bank investment awards, while the governing treaty requires countries to treat them like final judgments.

Argentina has now asked the court to reconsider. The 12-year period governs collecting an existing judgment, while Titan needed to turn its arbitration award into a U.S. judgment in the first place.

But Argentina’s proposed three-year alternative is even more fraught, because Congress expressly excluded the arbitration law where that deadline appears. And the court’s decision recognized that it was imperfect but selected it as a least-bad option anyway. So a rehearing seems unlikely.

Nonetheless, the investors winning in court doesn’t mean Argentina will ever pay. Foreign government property is generally protected in the United States unless it falls within limited exceptions, usually involving assets used for commercial activity. Aerolíneas Argentinas is also a legally separate state-owned company, so Titan couldn’t simply seize one of its aircraft to satisfy a debt owed by the Argentine government without piercing that veil.

That leaves Titan looking for Argentine commercial assets that are both reachable and valuable, and Argentina has decades of experience making that difficult.