Questions to ask on the US$11 billion and newly mentioned US$7.6 billion

After Mr. Jelson Garcia, manager of Asia Program for Bank Information Centre, revealed that Myanmar possesses US$11 billion in foreign bank accounts, The Daily Eleven asked if such a large amount of money actually exists and if they are the corrupt money.

https://soundcloud.com/lp-paing/mr-jelson-garcia-talk-about

Afterwards, the Central Bank admitted that Myanmar has US$7.6 billion in foreign currency reserves at foreign banks, but they having knowledge about the US$11 billion. The Central Bank failed to answer if the foreign currency reserves of US$7.6 billion are in circulation or in fixed deposit accounts. Such is not something to be kept in secret but something to be explained.

If the current government fails to unravel the US$11 billion and seek the concrete facts, The Daily Eleven believes that the next government will need to probe the case. There are also questions for the officially mentioned US$7.6 billion.

If the country is in possession of such a big amount of money, the government will not need to borrow loans from other nations, nor will President Thein Sein need to request the other countries to write off Myanmar’s debts. Even if it is required to borrow further, the government should turn only to the low-interest loans from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and Japan.

However, Myanmar government loaned from China at the interest rate of 4.5 percent, requiring itself to pay US$45 million to China within 10 years. Myanmar took a loan of US$100 million from China recently. The loan will be used to lend money to the farmers at the interest rate of 2 percent, which is quite high for the farmers to repay. While the government has US$7.6 billion in foreign currency reserves, should it borrow in haste the high-interest loans from China?

အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၁ ဘီလ်ံႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး Mr.Jelson Garcia ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ေသာ အသံဖိုင္-SOUNDCLOUD ENGLISH

 

 

အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၁ ဘီလ်ံႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ၿပီး Mr.Jelson Garcia ေျပာၾကားခဲ့ေသာ အသံဖိုင္

BIC (Bank Information Center) ၏ Asia Program မန္ေနဂ်ာ Mr.Jelson Garcia က ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံမွ အေမရိကန္ ေဒၚလာ ၁၁ ဘီလ်ံ ရွိေသာ ေငြစာရင္းငါးခု ျပည္ပတြင္ ရွိေနေၾကာင္း စက္တင္ဘာ ၁၀ ရက္က ထုတ္ေဖာ္ေျပာၾကားခဲ့သည္။ ယင္း ေျပာၾကားမႈႏွင့္ ဘာသာျပန္ေပးခဲ့သူ၏ အသံဖိုင္ကို ေဖာ္ျပအပ္ပါသည္။   11 Billions US Dollar

စက္တင္ဘာလ ၂၀ ရက္ေန႔တြင္ အဆိုပါ အေမရိကန္ေဒၚလာ ၁၁ ဘီလ်ံႏွင့္ ပတ္သက္ေသာ ျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံ၏ ဘ႑ာေရးဆိုင္ရာ ရွင္းလင္းပြဲကို ေနျပည္ေတာ္တြင္ ျပဳလုပ္မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း သိရသည္။

https://soundcloud.com/lp-paing/mr-jelson-garcia-talk-about

U YE HTUT : The government has not used state funds to open accounts in foreign banks-STATEMENT WORLDBANK

 

YANGON, September 12, 2013 –

The World Bank released the following statement on recent Myanmar media reports concerning the settling of arrears earlier this year by the Government of Myanmar with the World Bank:

“Mr. Jelson Garcia works for Bank Information Center, a non-government organization. He does not represent the World Bank or speak on behalf of the World Bank.

The Government of Myanmar made a strategic decision to clear its arrears to the World Bank and gain access to long term interest free financing to support reforms for the benefit of the people of Myanmar. This was a prudent decision at a moment of potential macroeconomic stress and sent a positive signal to the global community. It is common practice for Governments to hold reserves in foreign bank accounts in order to facilitate importation of goods and services and management of the exchange rate.”—–

EMG

Jelson Garcia, who has accused Myanmar of possessing US$11 billion in five foreign bank accounts, does not speak for the World Bank, according to a statement released by the World Bank.

Garcia is a manager of the Asia Program for the Bank Information Centre (BIC). Before working at BIC, he was involved with the Office of the Philippine President’s Program for Unification and Development. He was most recently employed with the Humanitarian Competency Program of World Vision-Asia Pacific’s  Disaster Management Office. The BIC is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization that advocates for the protection of rights, participation, transparency, and public accountability in the governance and operations of the World Bank Group and regional development banks, according to BIC’s official website.

Ye Htut, spokesman for President Thein Sein, issued the following statement on his Facebook page on Thursday evening: “The government has not used state funds to open accounts in foreign banks. If they have enough evidence to prove it, the government will be ready to take action.”

He stated only that the government does not possess US$11 billion in foreign bank accounts. But whether or not someone has possessed these funds is not stated. His statement neither confirmed nor denied that the money is in foreign bank accounts.

If the accounts are revealed to be privately owned, some observers say, the public will demand that the funds be returned to the state and its people.

The World Bank has not dismissed the allegation that Myanmar possesses US$11 billion. It has said only that Jelson Garcia works for the BIC and does not represent the World Bank or speak on its behalf.