Home ›› 17 Jul 2022 ›› Front
An International Monetary Fund (IMF) team will start discussions with the government on Sunday regarding a $4.5 billion bailout package Bangladesh has sought from the multilateral lender.
Rahul Anand, division chief of IMF’s Asia and Pacific Department, is leading the agency’s team, which will hold separate talks with senior officials of the ministries of finance and commerce, sources said.
The IMF delegation arrived in Dhaka on Thursday. The meetings, starting on Sunday, will continue until July 21.
They will also hold separate talks with the officials of Bangladesh Bank (BB), the National Board of Revenue (NBR) and the Economic Relations Division (ERD).
The points of discussion with NBR will include money whitening schemes offered in the national budget of FY2022-23, the revenue impact of tax exemptions, and efforts to digitise and automate the tax administration and its services, NBR officials said.
Last month, former finance division secretary, now the BB Governor Abdur Rouf Talukder held a virtual discussion with IMF’s Resident Representative for Bangladesh Jayendu De, seeking the proposed bailout scheme in the form of budgetary support.
Top Finance Division officials said they expect the deal to be finalised by September.
The request for budgetary support comes to prop up the dwindling foreign currency reserves, which stood at $39.8 billion until last week. The reserve could cover only about five months of the country’s import bills.
IMF officials will look into the impacts of the Russia-Ukraine war and escalating global commodity prices on the Bangladesh economy, the status of recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s large subsidy programmes.
The Washington-based global lender could tie in conditions for the bailout package. The conditions could include measures to increase revenue, lower subsidy expenditure, market-based exchange rate and lending rate, and reforms in the banking sector and tax administration, Finance Ministry officials said.
