By Asif Shahzad
ISLAMABAD (Reuters) -Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif said on Tuesday that his country was willing to discuss all demands of International Monetary Fund (IMF) to unlock its stalled funding.
The remarks came a day after central bank governor Jameel Ahmad said the country’s finance ministry was already holding technical level talks with the IMF.
The IMF is yet to approve its ninth review to release $1.1 billion, which was originally due to be disbursed in November last year, but got held up over fiscal consolidation issues.
“I want to request the IMF – and I had talked to the managing director of the IMF, and we have informed that we want to complete the ninth review without any delay,” Sharif said at an event in Islamabad.
“We want to talk on all of your demands,” he said.
The IMF has called for fiscal steps to reduce the budget deficit that include subsidy cuts, slashing energy sector debt, levying more taxes to plug the revenue shortfall, and a market-based exchange rate as conditions for releasing the funding.
With interest rates already at 17%, inflation hitting 24.5% in December, and foreign reserves as low as $4.6 billion, barely enough to cover three weeks of imports, the South Asian nation is in dire need of external financing.
A green light from the IMF will also help Pakistan secure further bilateral and multilateral funding.
The IMF and Pakistan signed a $6 billion bailout in 2019, that was topped up with another $1 billion last year.
(Reporting by Asif Shahzad, writing by Sudipto Ganguly; Editing by Krishna N. Das and Tomasz Janowski)
