BUENOS AIRES: Argentina’s Finance Ministry said on Friday it planned to issue $11.7 billion in new debt to finance payments to holdout bondholders who won their 15-year battle against the country. “This is what we need to raise in order to end this problem definitively,” Minister Alfonso Prat-Gay informed the Congress. Prat-Gay was defending the government’s deals to settle the claims of mainly a group of US hedge funds labelled ‘vultures’ by Argentina which scooped up its bonds cheaply after its $100 billion default in 2001 and then sued for full payment. Even after the funds won their case in a New York court in 2012, the government refused to pay, saying the so-called holdout bondholders should have joined the majority of the country’s creditors in a debt restructuring.