Argentina Decreto 449/2025 — simplification of the Mining Investment Regime (Laws 24.196 / 24.466)

Mechanism

Argentina's Mining Investment Law (Ley 24.196, in force since 1993) is the foundational fiscal-stability instrument for the mining sector, granting qualifying investors a 30-year guarantee that their tax burden will not increase. Decreto 449/2025 modernises three procedural aspects of that regime under the deregulation authority granted by the Ley de Bases (Ley 27.742):

1. Article 10 — fiscal-stability certificate. Previously, the certificate had to enumerate all applicable national, provincial and municipal taxes and consolidate them across jurisdictions before issuance — a multi-step process that materially delayed certificate delivery. Decreto 449/2025 reduces the certificate to a single-date statement anchored to the feasibility-study submission date: the tax burden as of that date is locked in for 30 years, with no pre-issuance multi-jurisdiction consolidation required.

2. Article 18 — third-party technical attestation. The previous regime required beneficiaries to submit a 1,000+-data-field annual investment-validation form. The decree replaces this with an annual sworn declaration accompanied by an evaluative report from an independent technical professional ("un informe evaluador de un profesional técnico independiente") — i.e., a third-party-attestation model rather than a self-reporting administrative form.

3. Articles 4–5 — SEGEMAR data-bank reassignment. Administration of the National Geological Information Bank (Ley 24.466) is transferred from the Mining Secretariat to SEGEMAR (Servicio Geológico Minero Argentino), an autonomous organism within the Secretariat. All Mining Investment Regime beneficiaries must submit surface geological data from explored areas to the national database — a structural step toward consolidating Argentina's mineral-resource data architecture under a single technical agency.

The decree applies retroactively to pending proceedings, accelerating issuance for projects already in the certificate queue.

Downstream implications

• Decreto 449/2025 is the procedural-tooling layer beneath RIGI

(2024-07-08-argentina-rigi-large-investment-incentive-regime): RIGI targets investments above USD 200M with bespoke 30-year stability contracts; Decreto 449/2025 modernises the pre-existing Ley 24.196 framework that all mining investors regardless of size continue to use. Sub-RIGI-threshold lithium-brine and copper exploration plays benefit most.

• Combined with Decreto 563/2025 (mining export duties zeroed) and the

Ley 27.804 glacier-law reform, the cumulative Milei mining-deregulation pipeline removes friction across the certificate-issuance, fiscal, and environmental-clearance stages of the project lifecycle.

• The SEGEMAR data-bank consolidation aligns Argentina with the data

architecture of mature mining jurisdictions (Australia's Geoscience Australia, Canada's Geological Survey) and reduces the cost of greenfield exploration discovery.

Open questions

• How fast does the median certificate-issuance time fall under the

simplified Article 10 architecture? (Pre-decree benchmark unknown.)

• Will the third-party-attestation regime be auditable with sufficient

rigor, or will it create a quality-of-information arbitrage between attestation providers?

• Does SEGEMAR have the budget and staffing to operate the National

Geological Information Bank as a research-grade data utility, or will it default to a mere repository function?