By Rodrigo Campos
(Reuters) -The International Monetary Fund is assessing the viability of Senegal’s financing strategy and analyzing its debt sustainability as it looks to finalize an agreement on reforms to underpin a new program, an IMF official said on Thursday.
A team of officials from the global lender completed a mission to Dakar without outlining a new support package after the previous one was suspended following findings of debt misreporting.
Political infighting and disagreements with the IMF over a possible debt restructuring have weighed on the West African country’s bonds, some of which hit record-low prices this week.
On Friday, the 2031 dollar issue fell more than 3 cents to 64.125 cents on the dollar, on track for a record-low close, according to LSEG data. It ended last year around 90 cents.
Assessing the viability of Senegal’s financing strategy partly depends on coming up with measures that would help reduce vulnerabilities around debt, IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack said in a press briefing, including centralizing debt management operations, improving transparency and strengthening overall fiscal controls.
Kozack said the approach to resolving the debt misreporting would involve measures taken by Senegalese authorities, and that the IMF would not request any early repayment of obligations.
“The IMF and the World Bank are also working jointly toward finalizing an updated debt sustainability analysis that would reflect the revised debt data and the macroeconomic assumptions,” Kozack added.
However, the question of how Senegal should proceed to tackle its suffocating debt burden was one for the government to answer, she said.
Senegal’s international bond prices fell this week after Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko said over the weekend that IMF officials were pushing for a restructuring of the country’s debt – a move he said the government would not accept.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos in New York; editing by Diane Craft, Philippa Fletcher and Paul Simao)
