The Debt Management Office (DMO) says it will raise the balance of the 2019 borrowings from Eurobonds after exhausting the options of borrowing from multilateral and bilateral bodies at cheap rate.
Reacting to reports that it has no plans to issue Eurobonds as part of its external borrowing in 2019, the DMO in a press release issued on Wednesday said the 2019 Appropriation Act provides for New External Borrowing of N824.82 billion (equivalent of USD2.7 billion at USD/N305).
To accomplish this, the DMO noted that consistent with its “strategy of reducing debt service cost, the plan for raising the New External Borrowing is to first access cheaper funding from Multilateral and Bilateral lenders as may be available.”
READ ALSO: Row over N1.9 billion debt : We are not owing FAAN, says bi-courtney
Thereafter, any balance the DMO said “will be raised from Commercial sources which may include Securities Issuance such as Eurobonds in the International Capital Market.”
The DMO reiterated that it “will continue to focus on its objective of reducing debt service costs by emphasising borrowing from concessional sources while considering Eurobonds and other commercial sources as secondary options.”
The misrepresentation it appears arose during the Islamic Finance News Nigeria forum where the Director-General responded to a question on whether the Federal Government will issue a U.S. Dollar denominated Sukuk in 2019 to which she said “was unlikely given the processes involved in the Sukuk issuance.”
Leave a Reply