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410 million euro for restructuring of debt
by The Daily Herald
Posted: May 28, 2007 13:50 UTC
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WILLEMSTAD - Dutch Finance Minister Wouter Bos (PvdA) has allocated 410 million euro for the first phase of restructuring the debt by the Netherlands Antilles. At today's exchange rate, this is exactly 948 million guilders.
The above is mentioned in the draft interim budget report that must be submitted to the Lower House before June 1. The Amigoe newspaper mentioned earlier that Bos is planning to reserve between 400 and 500 million euro in the Interim Budget Report.
The Interim Budget Report is the first report of the cabinet on the implementation and the outline of the modifications of the estimates in relation to the 2007 budget that had been presented long before the Final Statement was signed in The Hague in November. Because of this, it was too late to allocate money for the restructuring of the debt in the budget.
Nevertheless, the allocation is still being made in the Interim Budget Report. Reserving money for restructuring the Antillean debt influences the EMU balance on the Dutch budget negatively with 0.1 per cent of the gross domestic product (GDP). With the current perceptions and modifications of the estimates, this leads to a 0.7 per cent deficit for 2007, while a surplus of 0.2 per cent had been anticipated.
Some new expenses have been included for the Antilles and Aruba in the chapter Kingdom Relations in the Interim Budget Report. An amount of 7 million euro has been allocated for solving a few urgent problems.
This amount was settled in the transition agreement as supplement to the Social Economic Initiative (SEI) for the so-called quick wins. This is going to be a one-time short-term budget support for 2007 for the State of the Netherlands Antilles, St. Maarten, Bonaire, St. Eustatius and Saba.
Furthermore, 8 million euro has been allocated for expenses of the SEI. For this investment impulse that was settled in the transition agreement on February 12 of this year, 33 million euro has been promised to the three "smaller" islands.
The available 19.9 million euro for Aruba has been transferred from 2006 to 2007, because this island has not complied with the conditions for a balanced budget.
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