Turkmenistan's reclusive regime on Saturday announced a strengthening of the country's currency, confirming rumours that caused a run on the dollar in recent days. The government cut the official price of the US dollar from 20,000 manat to 17,600 manat, the first change this year.
On Thursday and Friday rumours of the imminent change spread rapidly across the Central Asian country's capital Ashgabat, causing people to queue outside banks in the rain to try to sell their dollars at the higher rate.
Until January, the official dollar rate was 5,200 manats - a rate unchanged for ten years, most of them under the reclusive leader Niyazov who closed the country off from the world. New president Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who took over in December 2006 after Niyazov's death, fixed the rate at 20,000 manats at the beginning of the year as he begins to implement reforms. But by Friday it had sunk to 17,500 on the black market.
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