Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa appoints advisory panel for debt crisis, IMF talks

Sri Lanka has appointed an advisory panel to provide guidance on how the nation deals with its current debt crisis and engages with outside lenders, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), according to a statement from the president’s media office.

Members of the Presidential Advisory Group on Multilateral Engagement and Debt Sustainability include Indrajit Coomaraswamy, a former governor of the Central Bank of Sri Lanka and Shanta Devarajan, a professor at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and a former senior director of development economics at the World Bank.

Sharmini Coorey, a former director of the IMF’s Institute of Capacity Development, is also part of the group. The panel will “engage in discussions with relevant Sri Lankan institutions and officials engaging with the IMF” and provide guidance to address the present debt crisis, the media office said.

Sri Lanka is facing a balance of payments crisis, struggling to pay for imports and service debt as its foreign exchange holdings dwindle. Discussions with the IMF are scheduled for later this month in Washington.

The crisis touched off political chaos this week when the entire cabinet of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa quit, followed by the resignation of the central bank chief, Ajith Nivard Cabraal.

Rajapaksa’s call for a unity government has been rejected by the opposition and even some of his alliance partners, and he is yet to find a new finance minister ahead of scheduled talks this month with the IMF for loans.

Protests against shortages of food, fuel, power and medicine have gone unabated. The heavily indebted nation of 22 million people has a severe shortage of foreign currency to pay for imports.