POSCO says it has a $700m credit facility for its Argentine lithium unit, and the lender's own project record puts $250m of that on IDB Invest's books

Seven hundred million dollars is the number POSCO gave. Two hundred and fifty million is the number the bank booked.

POSCO Holdings said on Friday that its Argentine affiliate had secured a credit facility of up to $700m from the Inter-American Development Bank Group to support its lithium operations, reported by Kim Eun-jung at Yonhap News Agency. The lender's own project record, filed under project number 15825-01 in the name of Posco Argentina S.A.U., sets out how that figure is built. It is a short-term revolving facility, and it comes in two tranches: up to $250m from IDB Invest itself, and up to $450m from commercial banks. The disclosure does not name any of the commercial banks.

The bank's summary fields on the same page put its financing amount at $250,000,000. They also put a syndicated amount at $810,000,000, which is not the $450m the scope paragraph attributes to the commercial tranche. Nothing on the page reconciles the two figures, so both are printed here as they appear.

What the money is for

The facility supports the development, start-up and gradual ramp-up of the Sal de Oro project, in the Salar del Hombre Muerto, across the Argentine provinces of Salta and Catamarca.

The disclosure describes two plants. One is sized at up to 25,000 tons a year of lithium hydroxide. The other is sized at up to 23,000 tons a year of lithium carbonate. Both capacities are given as estimates and are recorded that way here. Yonhap reports that the second of POSCO's brine plants is scheduled for completion in the second half of this year.

IDB Invest classes the project category A. That is the bank's own top environmental and social band, and the page defines it as covering projects that could produce potentially significant risks and impacts that are diverse, irreversible or unprecedented. Three review documents sit on the same page: an environmental and social strategy dated 2 June, a review summary, and an action plan, alongside the borrower's impact assessments.

The dates, and the summit

Yonhap notes that the approval came shortly after President Lee Jae Myung and President Javier Milei agreed at a Buenos Aires summit on 31 July to expand cooperation on critical mineral supply chains.

The bank's own dates sit either side of that. It first disclosed the project on 3 June. It gave a projected board date of 4 August, and it approved the facility on 4 August. It signed on 6 August. So the file was open for nearly two months before the summit and the board met on the day the bank had said it would. Neither observation settles anything about the other, and the disclosure attributes the timing to nobody.

POSCO's own announcement was not retrieved. The group newsroom answers but lists nothing on the facility, and the holding company site did not respond from this desk, so the company's account here is Yonhap's.