Moldova will receive financing worth 46.5 million dollars on behalf of the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Prime Minister Maia Sandu and the head of the IMF experts team, Ruben Atoyan, who ended his evaluation visit to Moldova, made statements to this effect in Chisinau today.
During the visit, the IMF mission and the Moldovan authorities reached an experts-level agreement, in the context of the fourth and fifth evaluation of the programme of economic reforms. The agreement is to approved by the IMF Executive Board in next September, provided that the authorities implement the preliminary actions agreed upon, meant to ensure the sustainability of the public money, improve the fiscal discipline and make progress in the rehabilitation of the financial and banking sector.
PM Maia Sandu said that, during discussions with IMF, the authorities had agreed on the extension of the present programme with IMF till March 2020. “We did this, in order to be able to benefit from all macro-financial assistance on behalf of IMF. We agreed on more actions and decisions the government and parliament should take, so that we can get the financial resources. We agreed upon concrete decisions and measures, which would re-balance the budget and would allow all important expenses dealing with the payment of salaries, spending especially for the socially vulnerable segments to be paid. At the same time, the most important component is possibility to get foreign financing worth 1.368 billion lei on behalf of EU,” Maia Sandu said.
The head of the IMF Mission, Ruben Atoyan, noted that the new cabinet had taken commitment to promote macro-economic reforms, so that the programme backed by IMF is completed successfully. According to the official, the IMF experts reached an agreement on the budgetary and fiscal measures needed to neutralize the deviations from the policies agreed upon, triggered by the adoption of the package of fiscal initiatives, capital’s amnesty and fiscal amnesty, which undermined the programme’s goals and led to the increase of the pressure on the state budget. In this context, the authorities plan to approve a proper rectification of the budget for 2019, in order to reduce the budgetary and fiscal vulnerabilities, without harming the priority social spending.
„The sides agreed that, on the next period, priority will be given to finishing the reforms in the banking sector, reviving efforts for the recovery of assets embezzled in the wake of the 2014 bank fraud and remove vulnerabilities from the non-bank financial sector,” the head of the IMF mission added.
The IMF mission started its visit to Moldova on 26 June 2019.
