UN tells Ghana to release Argentine ship A UN court on Saturday ordered the immediate release of Argentina's flagship navy training ship, the Libertad, from Ghana's busiest commercial port, where it has been detained since October 2 at the behest of Elliott, a US fund seeking to collect on defaulted bonds. The International Tribunal for the Law on the Sea, sitting in Hamburg, ordered that Ghana "shall forthwith and unconditionally release the frigate ARA Libertad," and enable the ship to be resupplied in order to set sail. Argentina has only a skeleton crew on the ship pending its appeal to the UN court. IN Americas Finance The ruling is a victory for Argentina in its war with so-called vulture funds led by Elliott, but a bigger battle in a US appeals court, over a New York judge's ruling that Argentina cannot pay its performing bondholders without also paying creditors of bonds on which it defaulted in 2001, remains pending. A hearing in that appeal is due on February 27 in New York. There was no immediate reaction from Elliott, which obtained a court order to detain the ship after tracking its voyage on the Internet and pouncing when it docked in Ghana. Though Argentina has suffered many temporary embargoes of assets as creditors have sought to wring their debts out of the government, this was one of the most spectacular and embarrassing. Argentina had argued that its white-flagged frigate, the pride of the navy, could not be seized because it is a warship and is protected by diplomatic immunity. It dug in its heels, despite a complaint from the port authority that the incongruous presence of the tall ship in one of the busiest berths where cement and construction supplies are usually unloaded was causing a costly backlog in the country's main commercial port, Tema. The crew, with weapons on show, resisted an attempt by Ghanaian authorities to move it by force to a quieter part of the port. In Tema, where the Libertad has been a pretty misfit with its three tall masts and intricate rigging in docks with containers piled five high, about 20 freighters have been sitting in the Atlantic waiting for the chance to dock. Agustín Rossi, head of the government's bloc in the lower house of Congress, hailed the ruling and said it was a setback for vulture funds seeking to "hound sovereign states." He told a radio station: "Luckily international justice and the Sea Tribunal have put things in their place." Argentina defaulted on nearly $100bn in 2001 and Argentina restructured some 93 per cent of that debt in 2005 and 2010. It has long maintained that it will not pay a penny to the "vultures" that it says bought the debt for pennies after the default but want to be repaid in full, though it has recently floated the idea of reopening the swap to pay the "vultures" the same as other restructured creditors. Argentina paid only about 30 cents on the dollar to creditors in the restructuring and considers it immoral to pay others more. It is challenging an order in November from New York Judge Thomas Griesa to pay $1.3bn into escrow for funds and creditors led by Elliott, that have been frozen pending appeal. It says an order to pay the so-called holdouts who rejected the debt restructuring would endanger the ability of other countries to conduct sovereign restructurings with potentially serious ramifications for the international financial system, a claim the funds themselves reject.