Puerto Rico officials yesterday responded to Senate President Kenneth McClintock's criticism of administration officials meeting Tuesday with rating agencies regarding the island's $9.48 billion fiscal 2009 budget, which passed in the legislature on Monday and now awaits Gov. Anibal Acevedo Vila's signature.
The governor's chief of staff, Jorge Silva Puras, said McClintock's statements politicized the government's opportunity to meet with Standard & Poor's and Moody's Investors Service and assess the island's credit rating. Fitch Ratings does not rate the Commonwealth.
"The credit of Puerto Rico is serious business with which you cannot play politics," Silva Puras said in a press release. "After almost four years of encumbering the work of the executive branch and never having shown the slightest interest in joining with us to protect the credit stability of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, now, out of nowhere, the chairman of the Senate jumps in to criticize those efforts."
Jorge Irizarry, president of the Government Development Bank for Puerto Rico, the island's financial adviser, said his team met with Standard & Poor's and Moody's to discuss the budget and also to gain a credit rating on the Commonwealth's upcoming $250 million general obligation bond deal that the GDB anticipates selling by the end of this month with Morgan Stanley as the lead underwriter.
"We have an ongoing dialogue with the rating agencies," Irizarry said. "We had scheduled this meeting previously and it's just to keep them abreast of where we are in our budget, that's the purpose."
Irizarry said officials also presented Acevedo Vila's budget proposals to the credit rating agencies before the governor released his fiscal 2009 operating budget to the legislature in February.
"We want to have comfort that this budget does not present a problem or a concern for the rating agencies," he said.
Irizarry stressed that the GDB does not see or rely on the credit rating agencies as entities to instruct the Commonwealth on what specifically it should or should not do within its operating budget.
"We do not go to them as an adviser or as a consultant," Irizarry said. "We go to them as the people that are watching our credit and it's about communication, and whether we do it before [the governor] signs the budget or after he signs it, has nothing to do with it."
Puerto Rico carries Baa3 and BBB-minus ratings from Moody's Investors Service and Standard & Poor's, respectively.
