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Richest Seven to work out aid for Sri Lanka
G7 countries will be meeting in London on February 4-5 to decide on aid commitments to tsunami-affected countries including Sri Lanka after studying reports from the IMF and the World Bank, officials said yesterday.

The World Bank's Sri Lanka Country Director Peter Harrold said this would be a more important meeting than last week's Paris Club parley of creditor nations which offered a moratorium on debt payments for Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the Seychelles.

He said the IMF had been asked to prepare an assessment and cost of the economic and social damage from the tsunamis while the World Bank was presenting a cost estimate on the reconstruction process. "G7 will decide on aid commitments based on these two reports."

The freeze on debt payments, endorsed by creditor nations, will provide some "breathing" space on repayment schedules but it "still means that Sri Lanka has to pay it at some later stage," Mr. Harrold said, adding that the government would welcome this particularly since a payment of some $55 million to the IMF was due in a week or so.

The IMF on Friday said it had agreed to a rescheduling of the payments due from Sri Lanka in 2005. The G7 groups Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United States.
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