Officials Make Information About Public Debt Even More Secret

They used to admit that Belarus is on the verge of a debt trap.

The state debt of Belarus as of May 1 amounted to 61 billion 85.2 million rubles. This is reported by the Ministry of Finance. This amount is almost 4.9 billion rubles less than at the beginning of April. At the same time, officials classified whether our country borrowed funds in April. For example, in the data for March, the Ministry of Finance reported how much the country paid on public debt, as well as how much it borrowed, writes zerkalo.io.

At the beginning of April, the public debt amounted to 65.9 billion rubles.

External public debt as of May 1 was at the level of 18 billion 56.6 million dollars. Taking into account exchange rate differences, it increased by $300.9 million in April.

Domestic public debt at the beginning of May amounted to 13 billion 173.9 million rubles. Taking into account exchange rate differences, this is approximately 32.4 million rubles more than a month earlier.

At the same time, the Ministry of Finance does not report whether in April our country borrowed funds from abroad or from the population. Earlier, the department stopped publishing information about who exactly Minsk borrows money from, and also with whom it pays off loans.

Earlier, officials admitted that public debt has become a serious problem for the economy — "the debt spiral is growing, in fact, Belarus is on the verge of a debt trap." One of the reasons is the impact of the imposed Western sanctions, specified in the Ministry of Finance.

"Repayment is carried out through refinancing. The debt spiral is growing, in fact, Belarus is on the verge of a debt trap, when it will be necessary to raise funds not only to refinance the debt, but also to service it, officials noted earlier. "The deterrent to development was the excess of the growth rate of public debt servicing over the growth rate of budget revenues."

In the draft republican budget for 2022 it was stated that this year officials want to "patch up" the budget deficit, mainly through external borrowing, by more than 3.5 billion rubles. For example, they plan to receive a little more than 3.3 billion rubles in loans from international financial organizations (which were not specified), but of these, almost 1.3 billion rubles will be used to pay off the principal debt. Simply put, part of the new loans will be used to pay off old debts.

The World Bank previously noted that the prospects for the Belarusian economy depend on refinancing opportunities due to a significant number of state debt repayments ($2.4 billion in 2022 and $3.3 billion in 2023). "Issuing bonds to Russian markets remains one of the options, since access to EU financial markets is limited by sanctions," the experts said earlier.