July 29, 2003	Tuesday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 28, 1424

ISLAMABAD, July 28: Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz said here on Monday that debt office of the finance ministry was receiving a number of enquiries from the investors about the specific purpose bonds including what he called Islamic bonds amounting to $250-500 million that Pakistan proposes to issue in due course of time.

Speaking at a news conference Mr Aziz said that Pakistan was not in a rush, “We would issue bonds when the market is good.”

He said details of the bonds and the size would be made public when the plans are ready. He also did not elaborate Islamic bond and added Malaysia recently issued such jumbo bonds to finance its railway project.

He said the offers were there and the capacity of debt office was being enhanced and the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank might be asked to provide additional funds for project financing.

He said Pakistan would pre-pay approximately $1 billion to the multilateral agencies during the current fiscal year in addition to the normal repayments which would provide an estimated saving of about $400 million over the life of the loans.

This pre-payment would include $400 million to the Asian Development Bank (ADB), $500 million to the World Bank and $100 million to the IMF. The legal process was currently on under which Pakistan has to give roll-over dates for these payments, he added.

Responding to a question, the minister said penalties would not matter in case of these repayments because the size of such penalties was very nominal when compared with the normal interest repayments.

Mr Aziz said the foreign exchange reserves position would continue to improve even with the prepayment of loans and said it would cross $11 billion by end of this week from $10.838 billion on Monday.

He said many countries like Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines after reaching comfortable reserves position have graduated from the fund programmes to market based financing through bonds.

He said he was leading a three-member delegation to Manila on Tuesday to attend an ADB conference on regional cooperation among Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. Iran would attend the conference as an observer because it is not a member of the ADB, he said.

He said the TAP pipeline was not on the agenda of the conference that has been convened by the ADB president but might come up for discussion. The delegation comprised communications minister Ahmad Ali and commerce secretary Kemal Afsar.