The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will disburse this month the first tranche of about 400 million US dollars to finance the State Budget for 2022.
The fact was advanced by the spokesperson of the Ministry of Economy and Finance (MEF), Alfredo Mutombene, speaking in the program Linha Directa, of Radio Mozambique.
“It will be disbursed this month, I think it is 15 percent of that amount or less than that, to straighten out the State Budget, for specific expenses,” Mutombene said.
He added that it is important, in this first phase, the margin that the IMF allocates to sustain some expenses related to the public debt, valued at more than 14 billion dollars.
The IMF tranche has one main objective which is, according to the MEF spokesman, to convert the public debt trajectory to sustainable levels.
“So one way to do that is to go and get a source of recourse to repay, or rather pay for the capital services in interest,” he said, stressing that the accounts establish that the country cannot go and get new commercial debt.
“We always have to prioritize concessional (borrowing), which is the cheapest, has the highest maturity, and also reduce the pressure on the need to go for treasury bonds, which are those that the state goes for at the national market level,” he explained.
In 2022 the IMF signaled that it would resume direct support to Mozambique’s State Budget, an exercise that had been interrupted due to the eruption of the scandal of undeclared debts in 2016.
