Economic Affairs Division rejects criticism against government

ISLAMABAD: The Ministry of Economic Affairs Division said on Saturday that criticism on the government for payment of $100 million to ADB as commitment charges for incomplete projects is incorrect and misunderstood.

Reacting to recent news items and articles published in the press regarding Government of Pakistan’s payment of $100 million as fine to the Asian Development Bank (ADB) on incomplete projects, the EAD dubbed the “fine” is baseless, and misleading. It said the Government of Pakistan has paid only $15.98 million to ADB as commitment fee over the last 15 fiscal years.

Secondly, the term “fine” has wrongly been used by the media; rather a commitment fee is paid by the Government of Pakistan to the lending agencies against market-based loans. The commitment fee is levied on the borrower by the lender on unused credit.

All international financial institutions apply commitment fee as part of their lending modalities to the borrowing member countries. The ADB applies a standard flat commitment fee of 15 basis points on the undisbursed loan balances on its market-based loans. It may be noted that disbursement of funds depends on implementation period and physical progress of any development project which is 4-5 years on average. Therefore, all funds cannot be disbursed immediately.

The present government is committed towards reducing the transaction costs and improving performance of the slow-moving foreign funded projects. On directions of the Prime Minister, the Ministry of Economic Affairs constituted a National Coordination Committee on Foreign-Funded Projects (NCC-FFP) in September 2020 under the chairmanship of Minister for Economic Affairs.

The Committee since its inception has reviewed 222 projects worth $31 billion under the bilateral and multilateral ongoing portfolio and considerable improvement has been made in the performance of 41 slow-moving projects.

Under the ADB portfolio, only 4 out of 35 ongoing projects were termed as slow-moving under the NCC-FFP. Due to continuous follow-up of NCC-FFP with the concerned executing and implementing agencies, ADB in its recent trilateral portfolio review has projected that these 4 projects, including the Jamshoro Power Project, will be “on-track” by December 2021. Slow progress on the Jamshoro Power Project was not due to slow physical progress but delayed submission of external environment monitoring report to ADB. This issue has also been addressed.

Mehtab Haider adds: This scribe had done the story on the basis of deducted amount on account of commitment charges by ADB on sovereign and non-sovereign loans in the last 15 years and shared details on the basis of each year basis from 2006 to June 2021. This scribe therefore stands by his story.