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A US $455 million loan from foreign banks has angered human-rights organisations and donors including the IMF, which believes that it would allow the Angolan authorities to side-step international attempts to ensure transparency in the management of the country’s oil revenues, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said on Tuesday.
The EIU said that it was the second time that foreign banks had made such loans since Angola negotiated a staff-monitored programme with the IMF. Last September a group of French banks lent US $500 million against future oil earnings, thereby enabling Angola to evade offshore borrowing limits stipulated in the IMF agreement, the EIU said.
“The IMF is opposed to such loans because they form part of what it regards as a system of parallel state finances under which up to 40 percent of oil revenues have bypassed the normal channels of government finance in recent years,” the EIU noted.
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