{"id":23932,"date":"2023-04-26T10:37:06","date_gmt":"2023-04-26T10:37:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/sri-lanka-trying-to\/"},"modified":"2023-04-26T10:58:43","modified_gmt":"2023-04-26T10:58:43","slug":"sri-lanka-trying-to","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/sri-lanka-trying-to\/","title":{"rendered":"Sri Lanka trying to reduce overall debt by $17 billion, president says"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>By Asiri Fernando and Uditha Jayasinghe<\/p>\n<p>COLOMBO (Reuters) -Sri Lanka is trying to reduce its overall debt by $17 billion through restructuring, its president told the parliament on Wednesday as he sought support of opposition parties for a nearly $3 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme.<\/p>\n<p>President Ranil Wickremesinghe also said the country would discuss debt restructuring with India and the Paris Club of creditors on one platform and with China\u00a0separately.<\/p>\n<p>Caught in its worst financial crisis since independence from Britain in 1948, the island nation of 22 million people secured an IMF loan last month.<\/p>\n<p>Sri Lanka owes $7.1 billion to bilateral creditors, according to official government data, with $3 billion owed to China, $2.4 billion to the Paris Club and $1.6 billion to India.<\/p>\n<p>Wickremesinghe said no final decision had been taken yet on domestic debt restructuring. <\/p>\n<p>He added that the country needs to accelerate growth to 6% or higher by 2028 or 2029 to repay debt\u00a0and\u00a0develop.<\/p>\n<p>Sri Lanka is yet to finalise the debt restructuring plan which was expected to be handed over to the IMF, creditors and bondholders by the end of April, a senior finance Ministry source said, adding that the government is in touch with the IMF regarding the matter. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We are still finalising the plan, it requires a lot of serious discussions. The (restructuring) programme may get delayed a few days or a week,&#8221; the source said, declining to be named as they were not authorised to speak to media. <\/p>\n<p>Bloomberg News reported on Wednesday that Sri Lanka had pushed back release of debt restructuring plan to middle of May.<\/p>\n<p>Sri Lanka will likely have another year of economic contraction in 2023, ratings agency S&amp;P said on Wednesday but  noted that conditions in the country were beginning to stabilise. <\/p>\n<p>It affirmed Sri Lanka&#8217;s long-term and short-term foreign currency sovereign credit ratings as &#8216;SD\/SD&#8217;, meaning selective default, and retained outlook on the long-term local currency rating as negative. <\/p>\n<p> (Reporting by Asiri Fernando and Uditha Jayasinghe; Writing by Shivam Patel; Editing by Himani Sarkar and Christina Fincher)<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/sri-lanka-trying-to\/sri-lankas-75th-independence-day-celebrations-in-colombo\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reuters_Direct_Media\/USOnlineReportWorldNews\/tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3P05V-VIEWIMAGE.jpg\" alt=\"tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3P05V-VIEWIMAGE\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Asiri Fernando and Uditha Jayasinghe COLOMBO (Reuters) -Sri Lanka is trying to reduce its overall debt by $17 billion through restructuring, its president told the parliament on Wednesday as he sought support of opposition parties for a nearly $3 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme. President Ranil Wickremesinghe also said the country would discuss [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":23933,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1222],"tags":[1223],"class_list":["post-23932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-u-s-world-news","tag-updated"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reuters_Direct_Media\/USOnlineReportWorldNews\/tagreuters.com2023binary_LYNXMPEJ3P05V-VIEWIMAGE.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23932"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23932\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24243,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23932\/revisions\/24243"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23933"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/lynettelockhart.com\/client\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}