Finance adviser Salehuddin Ahmed on Sunday said that they were not worried about the availability of budgetary support from the multilateral lenders to meet budget deficit.
鈥榃e have checked expenditure, taken measures to increase revenue and remained cautious about projects,鈥� he said after a meeting with the Asian Development Bank vice-president for South, Central and West Asia, Yingming Yang, in Milan of Italy.
The finance adviser, who is now in Milan to attend the annual general meeting of the ADB, said that the Manila-based lender expressed reservations about the release of proposed budgetary support of $500 million.
According to the messages received in Dhaka by the finance ministry on the day, budget support, project loans, revenue reform, banking sector reform and the facilitation of trade for the private sector dominated the meeting between the finance adviser and the ADB vice-president.
Hoping that the ADB would keep giving project loans on a low interest rate, the finance adviser said the ADB vice-president inquired about the programme under the International Monetary Fund.
He added that the ADB wanted a 鈥榗omfort letter鈥� from the IMF regarding the country鈥檚 economy for making decisions on the proposed budget support.
Bangladesh has been running an IMF programme since 2023 to avail $4.7 billion loan by June 2026. So far, $2.3 billion has been disbursed in three tranches under the loan with the last one in June 2024.
The interim government that assumed power on August 8, 2024, could not get the IMF agree to disburse the fourth tranche scheduled to be disbursed in February.
It expected the disbursement of fourth and fifth tranches jointly in next June, but no agreement has been reached between the two parties.
The finance adviser reiterated that they had been running the economy without any loan from the IMF over the past nine months.
He also reiterated that they would not listen to the IMF advice regarding the exchange rate to avert any such foreign exchange market volatility faced by Pakistan and Sri Lanka.
The AL government, which was ousted on August 5, 2024, in a mass uprising, in its last budget announced in June 2024 projected Tk聽23,937 crore from the multilateral lenders like the IMF, the World Bank and the ADB.
The country received about $1 billion budget support from the WB and the ADB in the first half of the outgoing financial year.
