Several Thousand People Sign Petition To Stop IMF Loan For Lukashenka

Tomorrow the petition will be handed over to the representative of the International Monetary Fund to the European Union.

3270 people signed the petition against provision of the IMF loan to Lukashenka, as of today.

On May 23, civil activist Dzianis Kazakevich will hand over the petition with the signatures to the IMF representative to the European Union Jeffrey Franks.

Initiator of the petition Dzianis Kazakevich grounded the termination of talks on provision of the IMF loan in the petition letter, the text of which he also provided to the editor’s offfice of the charter97.org.

The letter, among other things, states the following:

"First, ... to ensure that any investment is effective, the rule of law and financial transparency are necessary. However, there is no rule of law in Belarus, since the judiciary is under full control of the executive branch of power. Civil society does not have any significant influence and cannot effectively control the budget expenditures. Thus, there is practically no financial transparency. The current leaders of Belarus have a long history of extremely inefficient financial management. Regardless of the macroeconomic situation in the country, the government of Belarus has been paying high priority to financing the KGB, the police, ideology departments, international sports events, military parades for more than 20 years ... The country's leadership has shown that it cannot conduct effective economic reforms. Thus, it is very likely that the new IMF loan will again be inefficiently managed and will not help restore the macroeconomic stability of Belarus.

Secondly, ... the future government of Belarus will need to carry out at least the same economic reforms that are needed at the moment, since the current leadership cannot hold them, regardless of the availability of additional financial resources. ... Financial obligations from the loan may adversely affect the work of the future government.

Based on these two reasons (very likely zero effect from the loan now and increasing liabilities for the future government), macroeconomic stability in the region will decrease due to the credit. This contradicts the IMF's fundamental mission to increase global macroeconomic stability. Therefore, we demand not to provide financial assistance to the government of Belarus, whilst Lukashenka remains in power. "