COLOMBO (Reuters) -Sri Lanka's pact with creditor nations to restructure its debt prepares the way for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to consider clearing the first review of a bailout next month, the global lender said on Thursday. Battling its worst financial crisis in decades, the Indian Ocean nation had been trying since last year to strike restructuring deals with creditors after record low foreign exchange reserves led to a default on foreign debt in May 2022. Wednesday's in-principle deal comes about a month after Sri Lanka's pact with the Export-Import Bank of China covering about $4.2 billion of outstanding debt, while clearing the IMF review could trigger a second tranche of about $334 million in funds.
Four years after Lebanon’s historic meltdown began, the small nation is still facing “enormous economic challenges,” with a collapsed banking sector, eroding public services, deteriorating infrastructure and worsening poverty, the International Monetary Fund warned Friday. In a statement issued at the end of a four-day visit by an IMF delegation to the crisis-hit country, the international agency welcomed recent policy decisions by Lebanon's central bank to stop lending to the state and end the work in an exchange platform known as Sayrafa. The IMF said that despite the move, a permanent solution requires comprehensive policy decisions from the parliament and the government to contain the external and fiscal deficits and start restructuring the banking sector and major state-owned companies.