<<Print>>

Minister of Finance, Seth Terkper says government has not taken the Sovereign Bond to settle recurrent expenditure. He indicated that no country borrows for such cost, noting that a country must use its taxes and revenues to pay its way out of recurrent expenditure such as workers� salaries. In a joint Breakfast Meeting with Radio Gold�s Alhassan Suhuyini and Citi FM�s Benard Korku Avle Monday, the Finance Minister stressed that even in a country�s most challenging moment; it is not prudent to borrow for the aforementioned purpose. �When you get to the point where you are taking a loan like Eurobond or even borrowing domestically to pay for recurrent expenditure, you must rethink�even in your difficult time, you must try as much as possible not to borrow for these types of expenditure�, he cautioned. His comment came after government successfully raised one billion dollars from investors after a bond issue that was oversubscribed by more than 2.9 billion dollars last Thursday. It is expected that about 25% of the funds would be directly invested into Ghana�s infrastructure in the Energy sector, while stabilizing the struggling Cedi. The rest of the money is expected to be used for capital projects and counterpart funding for pipeline projects and the refinancing of domestic and external debt. Also touching on the country�s dept levels, Seth Terkper chided comments regarding government�s constant lending which some economists say the country may be unable to pay back in the future. He said �yes, debt is always a concern for household, it�s a concern for businesses and it must be a concern for government...when the state borrows for a project, the state enterprise or project which is utilizing the facility should be made to contribute to the repayment of the loan that has been invested�. According to him, government has already taken three agreements to parliament to make sure that monies coming from projects are taken �upfront� in repayment of the loans, adding that all CDB projects were design this way.