IMF OFFICIAL HOPES TALKS START THIS YEAR

An executive IMF director yesterday said that he hopes programme negotiations with Lebanon could start before the new year.

An IMF programme is widely seen as the only way Lebanon can unlock foreign financial help which it desperately needs to emerge from one of the world’s sharpest economic depressions. “We hope the effort being made today will lead to access to all the data and to sufficient information ... all required data must be available first,” Mahmoud Mohieldin said after a meeting with Lebanon’s Prime Minister Najib Mikati. He added that any conditions the IMF would require “will not be harsher than what we see in Lebanon today.”