{"id":84815,"date":"2019-01-12T15:47:27","date_gmt":"2019-01-12T22:47:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=84815"},"modified":"2019-01-12T15:47:27","modified_gmt":"2019-01-12T22:47:27","slug":"lanka-struggles-to-repay-record-foreign-debt-sri-lankas-prime-minister","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2019\/01\/12\/lanka-struggles-to-repay-record-foreign-debt-sri-lankas-prime-minister\/","title":{"rendered":"Lanka struggles to repay record foreign debt : Sri Lanka\u2019s prime minister"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtesy The Island<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n

(AFP) Sri Lanka\u2019s prime minister said the country was struggling to pay back its ballooning foreign debt, blaming a recent political crisis for dealing a “death blow” to the economy.<\/p>\n

Ranil Wickremesinghe said his government was scrambling to raise $1.9 billion to help service a first debt payment of $2.6 billion, that is due on Monday.<\/p>\n

Sri Lanka faces $5.9 billion in foreign debt repayments in 2019, a record for the cash-strapped island.<\/p>\n

The country lost $1 billion in foreign reserves during a power struggle between Wickremesinghe and President Maithripala Sirisena in late 2018.<\/p>\n

Sirisena sacked Wickremesinghe in October and later dissolved parliament to quell any opposition, but Sri Lanka\u2019s courts deemed the move unconstitutional.<\/p>\n

Wickremesinghe was reinstalled 51 days later but not without a cost, the prime minister said.<\/p>\n

“We are yet to quantify the losses, but it was a death blow to an economy that was struggling to recover,” Wickremesinghe told parliament.<\/p>\n

Three global ratings agencies downgraded Sri Lanka during the crisis, making it more expensive for the Indian Ocean nation to access foreign loans.<\/p>\n

Sri Lanka hopes to raise $1 billion from the international debt market, another $500 million from China and Japan and a further $400 million from the Reserve Bank of India.<\/p>\n

Wickremesinghe has dispatched his finance minister to Washington to try to revive a loan arrangement with the International Monetary Fund that was suspended during the chaos.<\/p>\n

Sri Lanka narrowly averted defaulting on its sovereign debt after Wickremesinghe\u2019s reformed administration introduced a plan late last month to meet urgent spending obligations for the first four months of 2019.<\/p>\n

Sirisena came to power in 2015 with the help of Wickremesinghe\u2019s United National Party but personal and political clashes came to a head before the October sacking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Courtesy The Island (AFP) Sri Lanka\u2019s prime minister said the country was struggling to pay back its ballooning foreign debt, blaming a recent political crisis for dealing a “death blow” to the economy. Ranil Wickremesinghe said his government was scrambling to raise $1.9 billion to help service a first debt payment of $2.6 billion, that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-84815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=84815"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/84815\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=84815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=84815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=84815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}