IMF Violates Its Charter to Loan to the Ukraine

The IMF charter forbids the making of loans to countries that are either engaged in a civil war, or those who are at war with another member state.

That being the case, how the f%$# does the IMF justify making a massive loan to the Ukraine?

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has agreed on a scheme of war financing for Ukraine. For the first time, according to Fund sources, the IMF is not only violating its loan repayment conditions, but also the purposes and safeguards of the IMF’s original charter.

IMF lending is barred for a member state in civil war or at war with another member state, or for military purposes, according to Article I of the Fund’s 1944-45 Articles of Agreement. This provides “confidence to members by making the general resources of the Fund temporarily available to them under adequate safeguards, thus providing them with opportunity to correct maladjustments in their balance of payments without resorting to measures destructive of national or international prosperity.”

To deter Russian and other country directors from voting last week against the IMF’s loan, and releasing their reasons in public, the IMF board has offered Russia the possibility of, though not the commitment to repayment for Gazprom’s gas deliveries, and the $3 billion Russian state bond which falls due in December.

On March 11 the IMF board agreed to approve an Extended Loan Facility (EFF) for Ukraine for a total of 13.4 billion Special Drawing Rights (SDR), currently equivalent to $17.5 billion. Here are the IMF papers spelling out the details.

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Take a magnifying glass to the tables titled “Ukraine Capacity to Repay Indicators” in last year’s SBA, and in this month’s EFF: it can be seen the newly scheduled repayments to the IMF are significantly larger from now until 2019 in the new scheme than they were in the old one, and of course they go on for much longer – another decade in fact. . For comparison, go to the SBA document, “Assessment of the Risks to the Fund and the Fund’s Liquidity Position”, page 10; for the EFF document, open this link, and go to the similarly titled document, page 13.

At the IMF Andrew Tweedie (below left) and Mark Flanagan (centre) are responsible for drafting this sleight of hand; Nikolai Gueorguiev (right), a former Bulgarian finance ministry official, has been in charge of negotiating the terms with the government in Kiev. In 2008 Flanagan was much more sceptical in his assessment of Ukrainian government accountability and capacity to repay much smaller liabilities than is plain today.

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This trio is now making the IMF loan look less onerous for the Ukrainian economy by projecting faster recovery of GDP and exports than they thought was reasonable a year ago; and also by anticipating that other forms of debt relief, including grants, subsidies, and low-cost loans from the US and European Union will reduce the proportion of Ukrainian debt owed to the IMF.

That’s guesswork. It didn’t work in 2014 — because of the war in the east. As Lagarde’s reference to the ceasefire implies, and the EFF papers now confirm, if the war continues, the government in Kiev will be unable to repay; the IMF board’s loan conditions will falter; and disbursement of the EFF cash will stop, just as the SBA cashflow did from last October. So what calculation is the IMF making of the military costs and the war’s impact on what the IMF is calling the Ukraine’s fiscal balance?

There are 163 pages in the dossier released by the IMF to demonstrate that the new loan to Ukraine meets the Fund’s charter, lending conditions, and criteria for repayment. The term “war” appears only once, referring to “war-induced supply shocks”; the terms “defence” and “army”, not at all. Referring to military spending by the government, the IMF dossier acknowledges the “risks to the outlook are exceptionally high and predominantly on the downside. Fighting in the East may resume and spread. This would unravel confidence, increase the direct loss of economic and export capacity while military spending may rise sharply.” This is an admission that the war is what the IMF charter labels “measures destructive of national or international prosperity.”
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This reveals that past and future spending on the war and the rearmament programme President Petro Poroshenko announced last week are “one-offs”, below the budget line, and not counted by the IMF in the conditions it has set for the release of the scheduled instalments. Since budget funds are fungible, and since the Ukrainian government and Verkhovna Rada (parliament) have agreed to increase military spending substantially, the IMF was asked to say why it is contributing to the war risks by allowing EFF support for military budget outlays at the same time as it is concealing their magnitude in reporting to the IMF board.

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For the time being, the Russian Finance Ministry is not demurring. Finance Minister Anton Siluanov (right) followed Lagarde’s announcement of board approval for the EFF with this confirmation that Russia will contribute its share to the loan. “The [EFF] program will be financed via the IMF quota resources, and the funding from shareholder countries in the framework of their participation in the so-called New Borrowing arrangements. As such, the Russian Federation will participate in the funding in accordance with its obligations as a participant, and deliver the first tranche of the IMF program for Ukraine in the amount of $13.75 million dollars. The Bank of Russia will carry out the payment on 13 March 2015.”

Although the Obama Administration claims it will not deliver lethal military equipment, it has been offering loans, repayment guarantees, and cash support for Ukrainian military agencies to buy it through third countries. Russian analysts call this a takeover by the Pentagon of the Ukrainian defence budget. Details of the line items totalling UAH 85 billion (about $4 billion) approved this month by the Verkhovna Rada can be read here. International bankers say they cannot think of a precedent in which the treasury of a country at war finances a defeated opponent to renew the fight. Siluanov hints his reason is tactical. Moscow will not call a default of covenants in the December 2013 bond for $3 billion, he says, if Kiev agrees to exclude this debt from its restructuring of other bond obligations, and repays the Russian debt at maturity this coming December.

Let me get this straight:

• The US is pushing for the IMF loan to fund the war.  
• The IMF is pretending that there is no war.
• The Russians are looking the other way, because it has been implied to the IMF loans might be applied to Russian loans to the Ukraine, and the arrears to owed to Gazprom.

 Am I the only one to find this completely f%$#ed up?


H/t naked capitalism.