Finance Minister Faiziddin Kakhkhorzoda and the fund’s head Yaroslav Mandron signed in Dushanbe on 13 August. The terms are soft: twenty years, a ten year grace period, one per cent a year, with the money arriving in three tranches of 100 million dollars and then two of 50 million, according to Avesta.
Khovar, the state agency, states the purpose plainly. The loan finances budget expenditure including priority social spending, and it says this is particularly important given the fiscal pressure connected with the repayment of eurobonds. Khovar also calls it the first budget support agreement signed since the fund was reformed, and places it within a mandate of maintaining macroeconomic and financial stability in the region.
The fund is an instrument of the Eurasian integration bodies, administered by the Eurasian Development Bank. Tajikistan is not a member of the Eurasian Economic Union. It is borrowing from a Moscow-centred facility, on terms no commercial lender would offer, to meet a payment on debt raised in the international market in 2017.
Three things are missing from every account read this morning. There is no disbursement date, no published condition attached to any tranche, and no figure from the finance ministry for the eurobond obligation the loan is meant to relieve. The ministry’s own release, as relayed, does not name the bond at all; the framing comes from the state news agency.