$430m forMay Cash Budget Support Grant During Pandemic
The Fijian government had received close to $430million in cash budget support grant during the COVID-19 period. This was the revelation made by the Ministry of Economy Permanent Secretary Shiri Gounder while making a Submission to the standing Committee on Public Accounts yesterday.
The Ministry of Economy made a submission on the Audit Report on Compliance Audits Relating to the COVID-19 Response.
Mr Gounder said the last two years have been extremely painful for the country and the Ministry of Economy and its staff dealing with the crisis.
“I think just to contextualize the issue of this audit in the last two years, post COVID all our bilateral partners Australia and New Zealand, the European Union, government of China, the multilateral agencies like the ADB, World Bank, JICA, AIIB and most of the development partners came to assist Fiji in the entire COVID period,” he said.
“The government of Fiji received a cash budget support grant somewhere totaling around $430 million.
“And this audit is basically talking about $23 million of that entire $430 million in budget support grant that was received during the COVID period.
“So the audit was done at a very, very, very early stage of the COVID period.”
He said in the same period the Government had also accessed a number of concessional loans.
“In the COVID period, given the challenges we were facing, a number of development partners, namely the World Bank, the JICA, and now the ADB have come on board to provide extremely highly concessional loans to the government.
“And during this two year period we’ve borrowed somewhere closely close to $900 million in concessional loans, and as we’ve made some public statements about this.”
He added that the grant component of this loan was around $400million.
“Generally because the interest rates are zero, these are 40 year terms, 10 year grace periods. Basically if we take a loan today of $100million dollars, for the first 10 years, we do not pay the principal. The payment starts from the 11th year and the interest over the 40 year term is zero.
“So if we calculate the grant component of those loans that we got, that is somewhere around $400 million itself.
“So the to put it put in perspective, the real grant that was received by Fiji during the last two years in response to COVID, was somewhere over $800 million, $430 million in cash grants that directly came to the Fijian government in the form of budget support and somewhere close to $400 million as Grant element of the loans that we bought.”