Yes, Mr. McKay.
When President Néstor Kirchner, the former President of Argentina, requested that I join government as the Secretary of the Environment, he decided to put the Secretary of the Environment at the ministerial rank. He gave four times more budget than we'd had before, and Argentina managed to receive the biggest loan ever from the World Bank, $800 million, for the performance of environmental policies in Argentina.
Yes, we built environmental policy, and Argentinian government began, for the first time in history, to put a lot of pressure on compliance on environmental law. We shut down Shell, for example. Shell has the biggest mine and refinery here in Argentina. We shut them down because they were not complying with the law. We worked closely with the Minister of the Environment from the Netherlands to make Shell comply with environmental law in Argentina. I must say that the cooperation between the two governments, even though Shell was putting a lot of pressures on gas prices in Argentina because we were shutting them down, was excellent. Finally, Shell signed an agreement with the government, with the Secretary of the Environment, and invested what we requested in environmental cleanup to comply with the environmental law. It was the same with Firestone and Danone.
Yes, we made enemies, but we also made friends along the way. At the beginning there was a lot of reluctance about our performance, but at the end the companies began to understand that we could also help them to comply with the law.
I'm sorry to say that--