Sri Lanka’s prime minster admitted to parliament that the government still does not know much debt it owes, in an address earlier this month as government debt continues to grow under the current Sri Lankan regime.
“We still don’t know the exact total debt number,” Ranil Wickremesinghe confessed to parliament, reports Forbes.
Official estimates number at $64.9 billion, of which $8 billion is owed solely to China. The massive loans taken out by Colombo mean that 95.4% of all government revenue is currently going towards debt repayment.
Though many of these loans were acquired before the current government came into power, “this doesn’t necessarily mean that Sri Lanka’s current administration is doing much better,” wrote Wade Shepard. Under the current government domestic debt grew by 12% and external debt by 25%, despite no new large scale infrastructure projects having been initiated.
Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa, said that with the money the Mr Wiuckremesinghe’s government has borrowed so far he could have built “two Mattala Airports, one Hambantota Port, one Norochcholai Coal Power Plant, one Colombo-Matara Highway, one Colombo-Katunayake Highway, not one, but two Colombo Port cities and one 500 MW Sampur Coal Power Plant…”
See more from Forbes here.