ISLAMABAD: The government has made $1.538 billion pre-payment of costly loans to different international donor organisations in order to pull out the country from the clutches of higher payment in the form of interest, sources told Daily Times here on Wednesday.
But despite pre-payment of costly loans, total outstanding foreign loan is $55.230 billion as of February 2010. The costly pre-payments were made to Asian Development Bank $1.170 billion, Japan Bank for International Cooperation $350 million and “Technopromexpost” of the Russian Federation $18.3 million, the sources maintained.
Apart from the pre-payment of costly foreign loan, the government has negotiated successfully and got loans written off to the extent of $1.562 billion from different creditors from 2002 to 2004. US was the biggest country in loans written off to Pakistan and had written off $1 billion on May 4, 2003 and $495 million on July 7, 2004. Total loan written off by the US is $1.495 billion. United Kingdom has written off $33 million in September 2004. Denmark and Netherlands have written off $18 million and $14 million in December 2002 and October 2003, respectively.
After negotiations, the government remained successful in debt swap with five different countries. The debt swap details are; Canada swap 449 million Canadian dollars, Germany 166.2 million euro, Belgium 166.2 million euro, Italy $185 million and Norway $20 million.
The National Assembly was told on Wednesday that the total amount of country’s outstanding external debt has reached $55.230 billion due to fresh disbursement of foreign loans and exchange rate. The Minister of State for Economic Affairs and Statistics Hina Rabbani Khar informed the House that the outstanding external debt was $38.699 billion in 2007, $44.467 billion in 2008 but it stood at $55.230 billion on Feb 28, 2010. She said the basic reasons for increase in foreign debt were the depreciation of dollar vis-à-vis other international currencies during the period, foreign disbursement of foreign load and exchange rate.
In a written reply, she told the House that the government was regularly paying back foreign loans according to their amortisation schedules. “For effective public debt management the government has enacted Fiscal Responsibility and Debt Limitation Act 2005 under which the government pursues sound fiscal and debt management policy so as to maintain its debt within prudent limits and follow debt reduction path,” she maintained.
She said each loan amount is paid on due date as per amortisation schedule as repayment was not delayed even for a single day and in order to reduce the outstanding amount of these loans, the government has taken various steps including pre-payment of costly loans, got loan written off and converted the outstanding loans of some countries into debt swap.
To another question, the state minister said an amount of $6.96 billion has been received so far from USA under coalition support and an amount of $1 billion was expected to be received during April-June 2010.
Source: http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2010\04\01\story_1-4-2010_pg5_1
0 comments:
Post a Comment