KARACHI: On Thursday night, Pakistan received inflows amounting to $2.5 billion of recently-launched Eurobonds.

The State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) has confirmed on its twitter account that SBP has received the government’s proceeds of $2.5 billion against Eurobond issuance in its account.

With the arrival of these inflows, the State Bank’s foreign exchange reserves surged to over $16 billion, which is the highest level since July 2017, the SBP said.

Recently, after a gap of over three years, Pakistan entered the international capital market for the sale of Eurobonds. Accordingly, a multi-tranche transaction of 5-, 10- and 30-year Eurobonds was conducted to build up the foreign exchange reserves.

Overall, the county has received some $3 billion foreign inflows during the last two weeks. Some, $2.5 billion of Eurobond were arrived on Thursday night. While, in the last week of March, Pakistan received around $500 million from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a loan tranche under Extended Fund Facility (EFF) for budget support. The tranche was released by the IMF after the fifth reviews of the Extended Arrangement under the EFF programme for Pakistan.

The country’s total liquid foreign exchange reserves were $ 20.679 billion as on April 2, 2021 and with the arrival of proceeds Eurobond, the country’s foreign exchange reserves are likely to cross the $23 billion mark.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2021