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US Attorney Preet Bharara and other financial heavyweights opposing Paul Singer’s attempt to get Argentina to pay debt

A growing list of financial and legal heavyweights are playing pile-on Paul Singer.

US Attorney Preet Bharara and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink are among the latest bold-faced names to oppose Singer’s attempt to get Argentina to pay him and others $1.3 billion on defaulted debt.

Singer, the hedge fund billionaire who runs Elliott Management, is among the 8 percent of Argentina debtholders who refused to accept a 70 percent haircut following a 2001 default by the embattled South American country.

Singer inched closer to winning the epic legal showdown in November when a federal judge ruled Argentina could not pay Fink’s BlackRock or other holders of the reorganized debt without putting money in escrow for Singer’s band of investors.

An appeals court slowed Singer’s victory parade but refused to set aside the judge’s order.

Now, Bharara, Fink’s $3.67 trillion bond firm and others are urging the appeals court to throw the case out.

Such reversals are uncommon, but the twists and turns of this case have confounded all parties.

“Federal courts do go back on what they say, and here there really is quite the full court press,” said sovereign debt expert Anna Gelpern.

Fink and other holders of restructured debt piped up recently because they fear not getting paid.

Argentina President Cristina Kirchner has insisted that she will never pay Singer — leaving the 92-percenters fearful the country will pay no one if forced to pay both them and Singer.

After Manhattan federal court judge Thomas Griesa ordered the South American country to make a $1.3 billion escrow payment when it paid $3 billion to other bondholders in December, fears of another Argentina default swept the markets.

In addition to BlackRock, debtholders piling on Singer include Gramercy, Brevan Howard and Alliance Bernstein.

Including separate holders of euro-denominated Argentine bonds or warrants — Perry Capital, Redwood Capital, Knighthead Capital and Canyon Capital — these bondholders hold more than $3 billion in Argentine debt.

And last week, for the first time, the US Attorney’s office also weighed in, saying that the court erred in its initial interpretation of equal treatment of bondholders that resulted in the payment plan.

The “novel interpretation” is “incorrect and adverse to the US’ policy interests,” said the brief signed by Bharara.

Last week Argentina also asked the appeals court to reverse itself and declare its earlier ruling invalid. The embattled country suggested a remedy of offering Elliott the same terms other bondholders received during two debt exchanges.

“The executive is prepared to once again present to Congress a proposal that definitively treats all holdout creditors on the same terms as participants in the Republic’s 2010 Exchange Offer, but it cannot pay plaintiffs on terms that the district court itself had previously recognized are patently inequitable,” said Argentina lawyer Carmine Boccuzzi.