Category: Economy

May 1, 2009 (AFP) – Sri Lankan government troops have tightened their siege of the last strip of land on the island still controlled by Tamil Tiger rebels and are poised for a final assault, the military said Friday.Military spokesman Brigadier Udaya Nanayakkara told AFP that two columns of troops had consolidated positions along a […]

April 30, 2009 (LBO) – An International Monetary Fund (IMF) ‘Safeguards Assessment’ mission is in Sri Lanka as talks on a 1.9 billion dollar loan nears its final stages, the central bank said in a statement.“The Stand-By Arrangement (SBA) facility sought by the government of Sri Lanka from the IMF has now reached an advanced […]

April 30, 2009 (LBO) – Sri Lanka is close to finalizing a 500 million US dollar long-term loan from Libya, Central Bank governor Nivard Cabraal who is visiting the country for discussions on the government-to-government credit, said.In a telephone interview from Rome Thursday, Cabraal said Sri Lanka was negotiating a 15-year year loan with a […]

April 30, 2009 (LBO) – Consumer inflation in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, in the 12-months to April slowed to 2.9 percent from 5.3 percent in March, with prices declining for the seventh straight month, the statistics office said.The Colombo Consumer Prices Index (CCPI) has been declining on an absolute basis from October after peaking at […]

April 30, 2009 (AFP) – About 400 Sri Lankan civilians returned home on Thursday two years after being forced to flee by fighting in the country’s ethnic conflict, the United Nations refugee agency said. Sri Lanka’s Disaster Management Minister Mahinda Samarasinghe said the government was hoping to resettle all Tamil civilians within a year as […]

April 28, 2009 (AFP) – Sri Lanka’s airports and hospitals have been put on alert for swine flu, a health official said Tuesday. “The country has been put on alert for a possible outbreak of swine influenza,” said Paba Palihawadana, the chief epidemiologist at the state-run epidemiology unit. Surgical masks and medicines have been distributed […]

April 26, 2009 (LBO) – A judge of Sri Lanka’s Court of Appeal who has been appointed to head the island’s revenue office will continue to hold both offices, while the existing revenue chief would be moved to the finance ministry, media reports said. The current tax chief S Angammana, had been moved to the […]

BEIJING, April 25, 2009 (AFP) – China’s gold reserves rose 75 percent from 2003 to 2008, state media said, reporting that Beijing now had the world’s fifth largest holdings of the precious metal.China had 1,054 tonnes of gold by the end of 2008, up 454 tonnes from the 600 tonnes that it said it had […]

April 20, 2009 (LBO) – Sri Lanka will chair a meeting of South Asian central bank chiefs on the sidelines of International Monetary Fund and World Bank annual meetings later this week, Central Bank Governor Nivard Cabraal said. To develop domestic-oriented economy or successfully ‘stimulate’ an economy through looser policy (money printing) a country has […]

April 20, 2009 (LBO) – The United States, which has called for a political package to end Sri Lanka’s internal conflict and expressed concern over civilians caught in fighting, is flexing its muscles over an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout for the island.Sri Lanka has applied for at least 1.9 billion US dollars from the […]

WASHINGTON, April 17, 2009 (AFP) – The International Monetary Fund approved a 47-billion-dollar credit line for Mexico Friday under a new scheme designed to throw a cash lifeline to countries hit by the global economic crisis. “The Mexican authorities have stated they intend to treat the arrangement as precautionary and do not intend to draw […]

April 18, 2009 (LBO) – Sri Lanka’s inflation will dip below zero briefly by the middle of 2009, the island’s central bank governor Nivard Cabraal said as the world is gripped by a classic deflationary collapse. During the great depression, when the dollar strengthened and people pulled money out of banks to bury in their […]