Sri Lanka given 6 more months to repay Bangladesh's $200m loan
Bangladesh has accepted the request of Sri Lanka to extend the repayment period of the 200 million US dollar loan it had given to the Island nation in May 2021.
The country has granted Sri Lanka, which has been facing an acute greenback shortage for months, six more months to repay the loan, reports NewsWire.
Earlier, the Sri Lankan central bank sought time from Bangladesh to make the first installment of the 200 million dollar credit by March this year, hoping that it would be able to restructure its debt by then.
'Sri Lanka is seeking six more months and said it would make its first installment by August this year and another installment by September,' said Bangladesh Bank Governor Abdur Rouf Talukder while speaking to a group of journalists after a meeting with P Nandalal Weerasinghe, governor of the central bank of Sri Lanka, at the 2023 Spring Meetings of the World Bank Group and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington on Friday.
Sri Lanka is facing its worst economic crisis in history. Colombo could not start repaying the loan and announced its external debt default in April of 2022 amid a deepening crisis.
Previous month, Sri Lanka secured a 2.9 billion dollar programme from the IMF to tackle its huge debt burden. The country owes 7.1 billion dollar to bilateral creditors, with 3 billion dollar owed to China, followed by $2.4 billion to the Paris Club, and 1.6 billion dollar to India.
.png "Advertisement")
