$400 million loans to be pre-paid soon: Shaukat

The government has decided to pre-pay $400 million guaranteed loans to various OECD countries within the next few weeks.
Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz told reporters that Parco's $350 million and Civil Aviation's $50 million loans, with interest rate of 7.3 percent, would be repaid within the next few weeks, notices for which have been sent to the donors.
Parco decided to pre-pay this loan after its board's approval and raised the money locally from a consortium of banks including National Bank, Habib Bank, Muslim Commercial Bank and Standard Chartered.
This would save almost Rs 400 million to these organisations.
The government has to pay $400 million more to meet its $2 billion pre-payment before end of December 2004.
The remaining $400 million would be pre-paid against the suppliers' credit taken at the rate of 6-8 percent.
The notices of pre-payments would be given on the dates when the payment dates would be falling.