Sri Lanka President invites leaders of opposition parties to attend IMF bailout programme: Official

Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe on Thursday urged the leaders of the opposition parties to attend a review meeting of the IMF programme next week to help the cash-strapped nation to overcome the financial crisis it has been facing since 2022, an official statement said.

On Thursday, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) began their two-week-long second review of the March 2023 bailout of USD 2.9 billion spanning over 4 years.

Wickremesinghe, who is also the finance minister, is the steer of the programme which had resulted in a series of unpopular reforms being set in to put Sri Lanka’s bankrupt economy back on course.

“The main opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, the leader of the National People’s Power Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the leader of the main Tamil minority party Sivagnanam Sritharan have been invited to attend the meeting with the IMF on Monday 11 March,” said the statement issued by Wickremesinghe’s office.

The opposition parties have been critical of the IMF-dictated reforms claiming that they had placed an immense burden on the population already reeling in the unprecedented economic crisis where Sri Lanka in mid-April of 2022 declared its first-ever sovereign default.

Wickremesinghe — in the face of stiff criticism of his unpopular reforms by the opposition who claimed that they would opt to renegotiate the bailout’s conditions — has been insistent that Sri Lanka was faced only with the option of remaining with the IMF programme to stabilise its economy.

Meanwhile, the state minister Shehan Semasinghe commenting on the day one of the review told reporters that the IMF had expressed satisfaction over the government’s implementation of its program and was looking forward to more legislative enactments to see the economy perform better to meet its programme targets.

Semasinghe hoped that the review would result in a staff-level agreement to enable the release of the third tranche of the IMF facility.

Two tranches of USD 330 million each have been released in March and December of last year.

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