Ukraine pays $2 billion to get $1,9 billion loan from IMF
To receive the $1,9 billion in the next IMF tranche, Ukraine will be forced to spend $1,5-2 billion from its budget - “cheap” IMF loans actually cost the former Soviet republic much more than they cost.
Economist Viktor Skarshevsky announced this at a conference in Kiev, reports a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“IMF loans are called cheap. Let's look at the example of increasing natural gas tariffs to see how cheap they are.
In 2017, the government made a commitment to increase natural gas tariffs for the population by 60%. What does this mean for the budget? That spending on subsidies should increase from 71 billion hryvnia (as is currently written in the budget law) to 110-120 billion hryvnia. That is, another 40-50 billion UAH must be accumulated in the budget in order to spend it on subsidies. And this is 1,5-2 billion dollars.
That is, it turns out that in order to receive a loan tranche of $1,9 billion, Ukraine must spend an additional $1,5-2 billion from the budget. Nonsense!
After this, there is no need to say that these are cheap loans at 3% - budget expenses are growing much more than this 3%,” the expert said.
Ukraine Pays $2 Billion to Secure $1,9 Billion in IMF Loan