"As this is a crisis beyond the control of government and business, international support by way of unconditional budget support and compensatory debt deferment facilities for official debt will have to come from multilateral and bilateral official lenders so that private debt and equity markets will not lose confidence,"President Rajapaksa told the ‘High-Level Event on financing for development in the era of COVID-19 and beyond’, organised via video conferencing by the Prime Ministers of Canada, Jamaica and the UN Secretary General on 28 May.
"The multilateral and bilateral official creditors to developing countries have a special responsibility to be innovative in creating such space for developing world to revive their economies and should not insist on normal conditionalities of lending, after all, most countries have honoured their debt obligations and time has come to provide new space through a decent haircut by official creditors," the President pointed out.
President Rajapaksa said he had spoken to China’s President Xi Jinping, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien on the matter.
He also emphasised that the Middle Income Countries seem to get subsumed under the overarching classification of developing countries, and thereby their requirements are not wholly met.
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