U.S. President George W. Bush and Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf/AP
By Neil Watkins | Jubilee USA Network
We had thought that this weekend Liberia would finally get the $800 million in arrears cleared to the IMF that will allow it to access debt cancellation. But it now looks like that won't happen.
It is outrageous - the delay. In the meantime, see below good outrage on this from Bono in todays' FT...We'll keep you posted.
Bono takes IMF to task on Liberia
By Eoin Callan in Washington, Financial Times
Published: October 18 2007 20:03 | Last updated: October 18 2007 22:33
The International Monetary Fund faced harsh criticism on Thursday for failing to meet its commitment to write off $800m in debt owed by Liberia, as Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, the country’s leader, met U.S. president George W. Bush in Washington.
Bono, lead singer of U2, told the Financial Times it was “an IMF-ing outrage” that Liberia had overcome civil war and met stringent reform standards to qualify for debt relief but that the fund was unable to keep its promise to write off the IMF’s portion of the nation’s $4.5bn (€3bn, £2bn) debt.
Liberia has been waiting 18 months for promised relief by the IMF, which begins its annual meetings on Friday.
Bono said that Ms. Johnson-Sirleaf was having to “waste time fighting with IMF modalities, ‘bureaubabble’ and unaccountable distant red tape in DC”.
“If we cannot back a heroine like her, then who can we support and what is the point of global debt agreements and G8 promises?” the rock star campaigner said.
Ms Johnson-Sirleaf said the issue was “consuming endless amounts of scarce time and energy, and delaying a strong signal to the Liberian people that the world is behind us. We urgently need to move forward to resolve this issue as quickly as possible.”
Liberia was promised debt cancellation as part of a global initiative once the country met IMF policy requirements. It met the targets more than a year ago but the IMF has repeatedly missed its goals for writing off loans, interest payments and penalties.
The delay is aggravated by a three-way split inside the IMF, according to people familiar with the discussions. Managers at the fund are insisting shareholder governments need to put up more cash to meet the full cost of the relief.
Middle-income countries argue richer members should be contributing more, while wealthier countries argue the fund itself has the resources to meet the gap.
Rodrigo de Rato, managing director of the IMF, said: ”This effort hinges on securing the resources needed to finance the cost of IMF’s debt relief to Liberia.”
He added that he looked ”forward to additional commitments from a wide group of contributors to ensure that sufficient resources will be in place expeditiously”.
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