LONDON (Reuters) – Pakistan Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb said on Monday he would hold talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) during his visit to Washington and hoped to get a new loan agreement in place as soon as possible.
Pakistan and the IMF last month reached a staff-level agreement on the second and last review of its current $3 billion stand-by arrangement which, if cleared by the global lender’s board, will release about $1.1 billion to the struggling South Asian nation.
That arrangement runs out in late April and the country needs more funding to avoid a balance of payment crisis.
“The purpose is to agree the strategies with the fund, and get the EEF (Extended Fund Facility) in place as quickly as possible,” Aurangzeb said at an event at the Atlantic Council think tank in Washington, where the IMF World Bank Spring Meetings was getting underway.
“We are looking for larger loan. We will need a two to three year time period, so that we can actually go through the structural reforms,” he said, declining to give further details.
