Martin Callanan MEP is Chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists. Follow the ECR Group on Twitter.
Argentina is refusing to abide by the rules of the international financial system. It has become an economic pariah. After years of being taken for a ride, Continental Europe and the USA have finally taken action in international aid bodies such as the World Bank to protect billions of pounds of their taxpayers' money that underwrites them. It is time the United Kingdom joined them in protecting British taxpayer money from Argentinian intransigence.
The World Bank, and its sister organisation the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), are between them lending Argentina billions of pounds of our money, yet Kirchner refuses to abide by the rules of those same institutions. Argentina has refused to honour the rulings of the World Bank's own arbitration arm, known as ICSID (Argentina now has a record 50 cases pending against her in ICSID). The Kirchner government has almost £10bn of outstanding debt to private creditors, but despite having over £30bn in foreign currency reserves in a Swiss account, it refuses to pay, or even recognise, these debts.
In addition to this, President Kirchner has managed to alienate, annoy or outright attack pretty much every country in the developed world over the past year. She has threatened the territory of one - Britain, through her economic blockade of the Falkland Islands; she has stolen property from another - Spain, through the expropriation of the Spanish oil company YPF/Repsol; and she refuses to pay back billions of dollars and euros owed to both governments and private investors in America, Italy, Germany and many other G-20 nations.