The International Monetary Fund will allocate special drawing rights (SDRs) worth $735 million to Bangladesh by early September to strengthen its foreign exchange reserves to counter the global recession, an IMF official said on Monday.
"It is a new allocation for Bangladesh as member country of IMF and it is not given as a loan, but as a part of the global financial watchdog's stepped up effort to inject liquidity in the central banks across the globe," IMF resident representative Jonathan C. Dunn said.
A first instalment of $630 million would be disbursed to Bangladesh's central bank on August 28 and the remaining $105 million on September 9, he told Reuters. The IMF said earlier this month that its member countries had approval a plan to bolster their reserves by $250 billion to help them weather the global crisis, disbursed in proportion to each member's IMF quota.
Bangladesh has a quota of SDR 533.30 million in the IMF. The SDR is an international reserve asset, created by the IMF in 1969 to supplement member countries' official reserves. Its value is based on a basket of four key international currencies, and SDRs can be exchanged for freely usable currencies. Bangladesh's foreign exchange reserves are hovering around $8.2 billion.
"The injection of IMF funds will raise the reserve of central bank to nearly $9.0 billion, meaning to cover an import payment of at least five months," a central bank official said. The country received more than half a billion dollars in the form of an anti-poverty soft loan facility from the IMF during the tenure of the previous government.
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