The Sri Lankan Ambassador told Bloomberg News on Friday in Beijing that the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka will receive another one billion dollars in loans, open a separate $1.5 billion line of credit and establish a $1.5 billion foreign exchange with communist China. He said he wanted to activate his swap. .
Sri Lanka, a socialist oligarchy led by the Rajapaksa dynasty for decades, is now experiencing the worst economic crisis in its history, before Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the last member of the family in power, stepped down as president on Friday. directly related to the Rajapaksa family. tends to take exorbitant Chinese loans. Gotabay and his brother, under former President and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and borrowed more for projects it couldn’t support, making it one of the world’s biggest losers. .
According to Gotabai Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s foreign exchange reserves have been depleted this year, leading to bankruptcy and widespread shortages of nearly all of the country’s essential commodities, particularly food, medicine and fuel. Rajapaksa also made the country dependent on food imports after the chemical fertilizer ban.
The tiny island nation in Asia has been making international headlines for months as the economic crisis caused an equally civic and violent popular uprising. On the one hand, angry Sri Lankan mobs set fire to more than 50 private homes of politicians, including at least two prime ministers, Mahinda Rajapaksa in May and Ranil Wickremesinghe last week. Conversely, last week, crowds of apparently hundreds of people occupied the historic residences of the president and prime minister to hold a grand banquet, eat hearty meals, drink the president’s wine and, oddly enough, use the president’s shower soap. The party ended peacefully on Thursday when protesters decided they had made their point because Gotabaya Rajapaksa had fled the country. Some left to clear.
This Friday, Sri Lankans continued to cross the streets to celebrate Rajapaksa’s escape from the country.
7 月 15 日 · 拉贾帕克萨⁇ pic.twitter.com/KCWHBwJ61r
– 中文 网 (@VOACinese) 15 July 2022
Gotabay Rajapaksa’s departure to the Maldives and then to Singapore resulted in Prime Minister Wickremesinghe becoming interim president. On July 20, the country’s parliament will elect a new president.
Meanwhile, the Wickremesinghe government appears intent on repeating Rajapaksa’s mistakes by seeking exotic loans from China to pay off China’s old exotic debts. Sri Lanka’s Ambassador to Beijing Palita Kohona told Bloomberg on Friday that Colombo has requested $4 billion in aid and several new billion-dollar commitments from the Communist Party.
“We are confident that at some point the Chinese system will accept our demands because these are not unreasonable demands,” Kohona told Bloomberg. “We have made similar requests to other lenders. Sri Lanka needs funds to keep our financial system stable and we are confident that the Chinese will come to the party sooner or later.
One of the loans requested was reportedly a billion-dollar loan to avoid defaulting on a separate Chinese loan. About ten percent of Sri Lanka’s huge debt belongs to China.
“The Federal Government of Sri Lanka has approximately $12.6 billion in outstanding bonds owed to international funds; all payments are frozen, defaults are fixed,” Bloomberg explained. “It owes almost the same amount to bilateral creditors and multilateral creditors.”
The release of Kohona’s remarks followed reports that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) was willing to resume talks with Sri Lanka after Rajapaksa’s departure.
“We expect a solution to the current situation that will allow us to continue discussions about the IMF-supported program,” IMF spokesman Jerry Rice said on Thursday, as the Sri Lankan news agency Ada Derana reported. Currently, Rice said that such negotiations cannot take place as Sri Lanka does not have a stable government, but that he hopes the IMF can bring it back “as soon as possible”.
These talks may be more favorable under Wickremesingh than under Rajapaksa if he wins the parliamentary presidential election. Wikremesinghe served as prime minister under Gotabai Rajapaksa, but became a family rival in 2018 when former president Maithripala Sirisena illegally tried to dismiss Wickremesinghe as prime minister to install Mahinda Rajapaksa. Last month, Wickremesinghe appeared to be critical of China, which has not insisted that it is “trying to talk” to the communist regime to torture Sri Lanka through unsustainable borrowing, led by Rajapaksa.
Rajapaksa said he tried to negotiate with China to get out of the BRI debt trap in January, but Beijing did not cooperate with Colombo on any meaningful debt adjustments.
The Chinese Communist Party vehemently denied any blame for the situation in Sri Lanka, relying on its propaganda weapon to prove that the massive debt to the BRI had nothing to do with the collapse of the national economy.
“Western trade creditors and multilateral financial institutions are responsible for Sri Lanka’s foreign debt,” the Chinese regime said. Global Times The newspaper ended last week bravely. “Countless research reports have repeatedly shown that Sri Lanka’s current debt crisis is not directly related to Chinese-funded infrastructure investments.”
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Source: Breitbart
