Islamabad: Pakistan has promised the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that it will make an effort to obtain concessions from the CPEC power plants, such as a reduction in the investment’s return on profit or a rescheduled loan payback schedule.
It is unlikely that the controversy surrounding the reopening of the purchase agreements for the power generation facilities built as part of the multi-billion dollar CPEC will go away very soon. A similar agreement was also signed by the previous PTI administration with the World Bank (WB) in June of last year in exchange for a $400 million loan.
The Pakistani government promised to approach Chinese investors for concessions in order to remove one of the obstacles to the completion of a staff-level agreement.According to government officials who spoke to The Express Tribune, Pakistani authorities promised to ask Chinese investors for concessions in order to get rid of one of the obstacles standing in the way of finalising a staff-level agreement with the IMF.
They further mentioned that Pakistan had told the international lender it planned to try to renegotiate the CPEC agreements. However, given the political sensitivity of the process, there are slim possibilities of that happening.The Chinese leadership has previously ruled out the idea of reopening these agreements because CPEC is the flagship project of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road Initiative. According to the sources, the government gave the IMF an assurance that it would look into the prospect of requesting a delay in the repayment of debts related to the loans that Chinese investors had secured from financial institutions in their nation for the establishment of these plants.
