Tajikam Portal

IMF Scandal Hovering Over Dushanbe

Kambiz Arman
Eurasianet

Burdened with an excessive foreign debt and facing a severe humanitarian crisis, the government of Tajikistan now finds itself disgraced in the eyes of the international community. One of the Central Asian nation’s leading creditors, the International Monetary Fund, is demanding repayment of over $47 million in loans after determining Dushanbe cooked its books in order to make itself seem more creditworthy.
The IMF Executive Board, meeting earlier in March, determined that the Tajik National Bank had supplied the international lender with "inaccurate information" about the country’s cotton sector, Tajikistan’s primary export earner, as well as top employer. The bank also doctored data concerning the size of international reserves, its net domestic assets and its credit policy. The deception pre-dated the onset of Tajikistan’s current crisis, in which severe winter weather has caused alarming shortages of heat and electricity.

"The Board agreed that the Republic of Tajikistan shall be expected to repay the Fund the three non-complying disbursements that were not discharged under Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative (MDRI) relief," the IMF said in a statement issued March 6. In all, Tajikistan will have to give back $47.4 million.

At the time IMF approved the loans, the Tajik National Bank reportedly led top fund officials to believe that the bank’s reserves stood at $450 million, when, in fact, they were roughly one-third of that amount. In addition, the National Bank also concealed the fact that the reserves had been pledged as collateral in order to obtain commercial-bank loans to prop up the cotton sector.

Dushanbe's Last Lenin Dismantled

tajikistanweb.com

Tajikistan has dismantled its oldest monumental effigy of Vladimir Lenin erected back in 1926, just two years after the Bolshevik leader’s death. Asia Plus agency dates it back to 1925.

Last year President Rahmon re-named the National Park of the capital - where stood Lenin - after the ninth-century Tajik (Persian) poet Rudaki and ordered to replace the monument by the poet’s new statue to celebrate his 1150^th anniversary later this year.

Lenin was stripped down on the night of March 1 and handed over to Tajikistan’s Art Holding. The latter will decide what to do with the capital’s last statue of Lenin.

Tajik Communists are still hopeful of retaining the right to the statue and erecting it in front of their party headquarters. The Communists’ plea was handed in to the authorities last November and thus far the government has not responded.

Shadi Shabdalov, the Tajik Communist Party’s leader, was taken aback by the news, since he learnt it only Monday morning. He has expressed his hope to Asia Plus that finally the government would comply with the party’s request for the statue relocation.

The news has thrown Communists into despair. "You can’t do that. He was a great man", Reuters quotes Sobhan Safiallayev, a party official. But it has been done and we have to wait and see whether and where the statue will re-emerge.