A mission of the International Monetary Fund will visit Ukraine at the end of this month to resume talks with the Kyiv government on a new $15 billion loan programme, the Fund said on Thursday.
“At the request of the authorities, an IMF mission … will visit Ukraine from March 27-April 10 to continue negotiations on a new Stand-By Arrangement (SBA),” Max Alier, the IMF’s representative in Ukraine, said in a statement.
The Fund has urged Ukraine to raise heavily subsidised household gas and heating prices to curb a ballooning budget deficit. But Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych last month pledged not to raise gas prices.
The IMF mission visited Kyiv January 29 through February 12 to discuss economic policies that could be supported by the IMF with the SBA. Ukraine’s First Deputy Prime Minister Serhiy Arbuzov said on January 14 that Kyiv intended to open a new program of financial cooperation with the IMF worth SDR 10 billion.
The previous Ukraine-IMF SBA, also worth SDR 10 billion, was formally terminated in December 2012. It was opened late in July 2010, but the country succeeded in getting two tranches worth a total of SDR 2.25 billion ($3.4 billion). The program was frozen at the stage of the second review in the spring of 2011.
For a year and a half, Ukraine had been unsuccessfully trying to persuade the IMF to drop its objections to the government’s subsidizing natural gas tariffs for households until the completion of its gas talks with Russia, but failed.
