Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman with Gita Gopinath, Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, during a meeting on the sidelines of the World Bank-IMF Spring Meeting 2023, in Washington DC, USA. Photo: Twitter/@FinMinIndia Via PTI
Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman will join her French and Japanese counterparts on April 13 to announce Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring Negotiations process, the IMF has announced.
The finance ministers of the three creditor countries will hold a press briefing on the margins of the annual spring meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington.
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“Japan, India and France will hold a press conference on Thursday on the margins of the spring meetings to announce the launch of the debt restructuring negotiation process on Sri Lanka,” the IMF quoted a Japanese finance ministry statement on April 11.
The three creditor countries are working together for a coordinated debt restructuring for sri lankasaid in the statement.
Japanese Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki and French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire will join Ms Sitharaman during the press briefing.
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe and his state’s Finance Minister Shehan Semmasinghe will also join the in-person live streaming.
The Washington-based global lender had made Sri Lanka’s debt restructuring a condition for granting the $2.9 billion bailout.
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The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund approved a 48-month extended arrangement under its Extended Fund Facility (EFF) with an amount of SDR 2.286 billion (about $3 billion) to Sri Lanka following assurances of financing from creditors.
Sri Lanka, which received the first tranche of the $3 billion bailout programme, has already completed one tranche to pay off an Indian line of credit that was extended early last year just before the island nation announced debt default. was received in
Mr. Wickremesinghe, also the island nation’s finance minister, led the IMF negotiations, specifically noting the contribution made by Ms. Sitharaman to the IMF to bail out her government.
The 17th IMF bailout in Sri Lanka’s history was approved after lengthy discussions on Colombo’s unsustainable debt.
Sri Lanka was hit by an unprecedented financial crisis in 2022, the worst since its independence from Britain in 1948, due to a severe shortage of foreign exchange reserves, sparking a major political and humanitarian crisis in the island nation.