By Hadi Fornaji.
Tripoli, 6 September 2014:
The Central Bank of Libya has denied . . .[restrict]that it has waived the repayment by Egypt of $2 billion deposited in May 2013 with the Central Bank in Cairo, to ease the Egyptian government’s financial troubles.
The CBL said in a statement today that social media rumours that parliament had ordered the forgiveness of $2 billion were plain wrong. Earlier LANA had quoted CBL governor Saddek El Kaber as saying that the money was repayable within five years.
When it was announced last year by the government of Ali Zeidan, the move to pass the money to Egypt, along with a deal to supply crude oil on generous terms, appeared deeply unpopular, during a period when money was short in Libya, in no small measure because of increasingly delayed salary payments. The GNC complained that it had not been asked to approve the arrangement.
Zeidan said at the time that the $2 billion was “not a loan but an investment”, while El Kaber himself described the transfer as “ a deposit”. No terms for the deal were ever revealed. [/restrict]
