September 18 () –
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has postponed indefinitely its plans to assess the health of the Russian economy under the so-called “Article IV” framework, to the anger of nine European capitals.
The Russian state news service Tass has said that the IMF has “indefinitely” postponed what would have been the first consultations since the start of the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, citing technical reasons.
“The IMF management notified the Russian side and the Executive Board that the mission’s work would be postponed indefinitely,” said Alexei Mozhin, IMF Director for Russia. “The lack of technical readiness to conduct the consultations was cited as the reason for postponing the mission,” he added.
Last week, the finance ministers of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, Norway and Poland sent a joint letter to IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva expressing their “strong dissatisfaction” with the IMF’s plans to visit Moscow.
These countries expressed their concern that the IMF, through its Article IV report, was not only limiting itself to X-raying the Russian economy, but was also issuing recommendations on how to improve it and indirectly contributing to the war machine against Ukraine.
The multilateral organisation had previously indicated that it was part of its “mutual obligations” towards member states to assess their economies. This, according to the IMF, had not yet been done in the case of Russia due to the volatility of its macroeconomic data, although this instability had already been “cleared up”.
Add Comment