BUENOS AIRES – The Argentine Government has formalized the withdrawal of the reward offered to anyone who could find or provide meaningful information about the whereabouts of the submarine ARA San Juan, which went missing in the Atlantic Ocean on November 15, 2017.

A decree published this week in the Official Gazette explains that the 98-million-peso allurement announced last February to encourage the search “has failed to fulfill its ultimate objective.”

(98 million Argentine pesos equals 3.52M US dollars based on a current exchange rate of 27.77 down from about 4.9M USD when the offer was first made and the exchange rate was about 20 to one.)

The document also underlined that in view of “… the time elapsed without achieving the desired success taken into account at the time of issuance of the aforementioned measure, it is necessary to revoke the aforementioned resolution.”

The offer has turned out to be “unsuccessful” to motivate the participation of private sector companies - national and international - in the operation, since, currently, the bidding process that was opened to hire a company properly equipped to handle the task has not yielded results.