The timing could not be more sinister. Argentina has ruled that the neo-Nazi Partido Bandera Vecinal will be legally allowed to contest the next election. Bandera is headed by Alejandro Biondini, a man with a Hitler mustache who appears on facebook and youtube doing a Hitler salute.

Yesterday, the US Supreme Court ruled against an Argentine appeal against its having to service hold-out hedge funds. The hold-out funds, having bought heavily discounted defaulted Argentina 2033 bonds remaining on the market after its 2001 default, then refused to join the the debt restructuring in 2005 and 2010. About 90% of bondholders agreed to accept conversion of the defaulted bonds into new ones with longer maturity and lower interest rates. Today Pres. Cristina Fernandez said the hold-out hedgies are practicing “extortion”.

Under the refinancing terms, no negotiations can be held with the hold-outs until next year. Meanwhile, not paying them along with the refinancing creditors, as US courts have ordered, counts as default. So it has to pay both lots of bond-holders under international rules, which would cost about a half billion dollars. Moreover, intermediary banks handling international payments of interest risk being sued by the hold-out funds. The jurisdiction of the restructured bonds is New York law, which means our Supremes' ruling is final.

What makes the two bits of news scary is that the leading hold-out hedge funds are NMB Capital's Elliott Fund, run by Paul Elliott Singer, and Aurelius Capital, run by Mark Brodsky. Both Singer and Brodsky are Jewish, something Pres. Fernandez did not need to mention.

You cannot safely eliminate Jews from capital markets. Even 70 years after the Nazi defeat, German stock exchanges miss the country's Jewish investors who emigrated or were killed. German listed stocks are not owned by German investors either directly or through funds. The largest holders of German stocks are American investors, followed by investors from other EU countries. German shareholders are third on the list.

The Peronist Party which Cristina Fernandez heads has moved away from the flagrant anti-semitism of its founders, Juan and Evita Peron, during the Hitler years. But it can revert if it has an opponent from the far right to counter.

More for follows, not from Argentina where we have not invested for over a decade, but from Canada, Spain, The Netherlands, China, Ireland, Finland, Britain, and Belgium. Lots of biotech and pharma news and a new stock buy today.

*A short-seller, Prescience Point Research, just issued a short sale on Chicago Bridge & Iron arguing that the Dutch firm uses “creative acquisition accounting to conceal its losses”, and that its “GAAP financial statements are divorced from economic reality”. It says that after buying SHAW, CBI adjusted its purchase price allocation downward to amass a ~$1.5 bn reserve that can be used to inflate future profits, margins, and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization). Prescience predicts that CBI will be forced into writing down its goodwill or restating its financing, which will trigger a debt default, or diluting existing shareholders with new equity issues.

I was sent a link to the report by Eiad Asbahi of the firm from Baton Rouge LA. At this point I have no idea what the charges amount to as I have not read the Prescience report.

CBI is down 1.5% today. It is covered by lots of analysts, starting with Credit Suisse which hasn't updated its April report which reported (as we did) that CBI maintained its 2014 guidance to $4.80-$5.65/sh (with a midpoint higher than the consensus and above CS's estimate of $5.05). The company's sales estimate for the year is $12.6bn-$13.2bn, with growth in every quarter.

As we noted also it has initiated a dividend which went some way to offset the impact of Q1 negative margin trends, as also did strong bookings of new contract awards. The backlog rose 20% vs prior year Q1 and CS says more of the deals were fixed price. Orders nearly tripled year over year in every segment except fabrication services which accounts for about a third of profits, however. Some even came from the US Gulf Coast. Of course if flim-flam is at work, CBI can book deals at a lower margin offset by its reserves.

Overall, the Swiss bank expects operating margins to remain at 7% like last year and debt to fall during 2014 from $1.8 bn to $1.25 bn. It rates CBI neutral. So do Thomson Reuters, and MarketEdge. S&P Capital IQ rates it fair, roughly equivalent. The current summary of analysts shows 9 buys, 32 holds, and 6 sells. Sell ratings have been falling along with buy ratings for the past year, since right after the takeover of Shaw, how we got into this oddly named ADR in the first place.

Note that unlike Chinese-registered companies, Dutch ones are seriously audited.

*Another Dutch firm, Yandex, is paying $175 mn in cash to buy the on-line classified business of auto.ru, which serves dealers and individual Russians selling used cars. The venerable Russian web site also offers tires and spare parts.

*Bombardier added new turbulence to its flight plans by laying off US and Mexican staff because of delays in flight test programs for a second airplane, the new Learjet 85 business jet which was supposed to be entering service this summer, following an earlier target of last summer. This delay follows the service target of the narrow-body C-series commuter plane being delayed to H2 2015. These matters boost the costs and narrow the appeal of the new planes. Of course the good news is that Airbus is in similar straits.

*Nokia after its annual meeting announced it will issue a special dividend of 0.26 euros per share in addition to the 0.11 regular dividend to shareholders of record June 1. The US variants were already announced in April, $0.1519 in the regular divvie plus $0.3591 in the special one. This initially also hurt the stock of NOK in Finland and London (it fell briefly by 33.63%! in London before recovering) while US investors are cheering.

*Bavarian Nordic will let us view its American Cancer Research presentation on Prostvac, but I haven't had time to watch the movie. BVNKF stock is flat.

*GlaxoSmithKline failed in its Tykerb trials to treat her2 neu positive breast cancer in combo with existing drug Herceptin from Roche. Now Global Data analyst Jamie Mallinson is reported in FiercePharma.com to have concluded that the GSK drug also failed mono-therapy trials. GSK has sold its oncology arm to Novartis, so it may not matter, except to patients.

Patti the Biotech Maven reports that the way Theravance was split may have been designed to let GSK take over the respiratory disease portfolio of Theravance Biopharma, TBPH. It already owns 30% of Theravance Pharma, but would be more interested in the part holding the rights to Relvar, Breo, and Anoro Ellipta drugs, with potential combined sales of $3.5 bn. Glaxo already owns 85% of the trio of drugs it is pushing to phase II. TBPH is up 16% (yesterday) while THRX is up half as much.

*Galapagos NV presented an update of its research over breakfast in NYC today, and the stock lost 6.76% in early trading, down to $20.373. I think the pros were worried about GLPYY betting the farm (the proceeds of the sale to Charles River Research of its service division) to focus on what research director Piet Wigenstock called “unmet needs” and Onno Van der Stolp's dreams of possible acquisitions and the creation of a marketing-commercialization arm in-house at the Belgian drug discovery firm. GLPYY also confirmed that two of its GSK joint ventures have failed to pan out, and that only one remains active along with others with AbbVie and Servier.

I was most interested in the joint preclinical work on cystic fibrosis with ABBV which offers some hope to squelch this horrible disease. It is looking at a prclinical drug, GLP 1837, which appears to work on the most common of the mutations which cause CF, combined with other drugs to crate both a superior potentiator and a superior corrector for the genetic flaws to achieve a 60%+ success rate in patients. At this point various combinations of up to 5 drugs are being examined in the lab and the selection process will be completed this year. This is now GLPYY's largest research effort.

Another new area for GLPYY is narrow-spectrum anti-infectious drugs (in contrast to wide-spectrum ones which do not require the doctor to know which pathogen is at work.) The plus is that more precise antibiotics can be tested in animals (and found more quickly) and can be rushed to deal with drug-resistant MRSA bacteria which can defeat broad-spectrum antibiotics. The drug is GLPYY 1492.

Another new area is triple-negative breast cancer and possibly other tumors (in metastatic melanoma) where some patient tumors (in the test tube) were stopped by GLP 1490. The next step is to find biomarkers for the patients it helps, for which GLPYY is seeking partners.

When we lived in France a neighbor's daughter had cystic fibrosis and died aged 14 and I have been donating in her memory ever since.

*Patti also argues that Compugen's report yesterday on its CGEN-15052 (which I wrote up) is very significant as it offers a way to destroy tumors without using chemotherapy drugs which also create problems for healthy tissue. Blocking an immune checkpoint with an antibody inhibits the cancer cell getting protein. This inhibitory pathway stops the tumor growing, and in some cases can even shrink or destroy it. The epithelial cells CGEN-15052 works against are the lining cells of lungs. They slough off and travel around the body and establish in other organs. Blocking their pathways avoids harming healthy tissue. Pathways can be blocked with alternatives (creating a traffic jam); destroying the site (like a bridge going down); or making the tumor attack something useless or harmless to it.

The two B7 immune checkpoint candidates CGEN found is identified as an inhibitory pathway for many forms of cancer. So checkpoint candidates would block this pathway. Identifying the candidates before experiments by using computational models saves time and money in drug development. CGEN is Israel.

*Teva settled with other generics to follow its deal to let Mylan produce a generic of wakefulness treatment Nuvigil. Mylan has exclusivity for 6 months in two years, and other generics firms including Sandoz, Lupin (of India), Apotex,and Activis can join the fray in December. TEVA is down on the new; it is supposed to fight every court battle. Teva is also Israeli.

*Canadian Solar is up on news that a Chinese expert, Eric Luo (of Suntech)predicted that the current wave of Chinese construction of large scale solar photovoltaic plants means that the cost of solar will fall to match the costs of coal fired power plant as soon as two years from now. This will “completely transform” the world's second biggest economy in energy matters. CSIQ is Canadian and not target of anti-dumping US tariffs.

*Abendgoa Yield plc underwriters exercised their green shoe option and as a result the spinoff raised $828.75 mn before fees. Parent Abendgoa Group will invest the money for green energy on behalf of its sub.

*Covidien's rating will be raised by Fitch and Standard & Poors because it is being taken over by Medtronic.

*I bought Infosys today at $53.77/sh. INFY is a turnaround play in Indian IT.