CORRECTED-US court freezes $2.7 bln in Argentine assets

* Banks and investment banks may not move assets

* Argentina plans to tap foreign reserves to pay debt

(Corrects date of restructuring in first sentence)

NEW YORK, Jan 13 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge has blocked organizations holding about $2.7 billion in Argentine assets from moving them, in the ongoing dispute between investors and Buenos Aires over the 2005 debt restructuring.

Written rulings by Manhattan federal court Judge Thomas Griesa, which were dated Jan. 11 and made public on Wednesday, granted the restraining orders requested by plaintiffs EM Ltd and NML Capital Ltd funds and Aurelius Capital.

The amounts, about $2.4 billion for EM and NML and $335 million for Aurelius, includes final judgments in favor of the funds plus accrued post-judgment interest.

Griesa's ruling in the EM Ltd and NML case said the order prevented the entities, including several banks and several investment banks, "from directly or indirectly transferring, or ordering, directing, or requesting the transfer of any property on deposit with them or held under their control, such as will satisfy the above-mentioned sum of $2,374,589,275."

In a similar ruling, Aurelius Capital has $335 million in judgments issued.

Argentine Economy Minister Amado Boudou said on Tuesday that Griesa had frozen $1.7 million in Central Bank accounts, clouding plans by Argentina's government to tap bank foreign reserves to pay the public debt this year. [ID:N12112043]

Boudou said the maximum amount of central bank assets that could be blocked under the order was $15 million.

Argentina defaulted on roughly $100 billion of sovereign debt eight years ago and later restructured the debt with a steep discount. Holders of some $20 billion in defaulted Argentine bonds did not enter the restructuring and some of them have sued, trying to recover the full value of the paper.

Griesa is the judge who has handled the cases as the Argentine government has repeatedly criticized some of the funds that have sued, saying they did not lose money during the 2001-02 default because they bought the bonds later when they were cheap.

The case is NML Capital Ltd v. The Republic of Argentina and Banco de La Nacion Argentina, EM Ltd., U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York No. 03-02507.

(Reporting by Grant McCool and Daniel Bases in New York and Helen Popper in Buenos Aires)