Nandalal Weerasinghe, Governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka, says that he cannot comment on debt restructuring due to sensitive matters regarding market affairs.
“In the next 4-5 years, on average, we have about 6 billion dollars of external debt to pay off. After that, four to five billion dollars and 27 billion dollars have to be paid within 4-5 years. When we announced our debt default, we only wanted to restructure external debt and resolve the foreign exchange crisis. That was the situation in April. As we moved forward, we reached an official level agreement with the International Monetary Fund and officially began the process of restructuring our debt. As officials, we are not in a position to talk about debt restructuring, because they are market sensitive. So I cannot comment on this. From the day we went into an officer-level agreement, we started negotiating with our creditors with financial agreement consultants. It is good to have transparency in the government’s dealings with the International Monetary Fund. But we can’t disclose certain market-sensitive information until it’s implemented.”
Weerasinghe said this while joining a television program.
