Staff Reporter :
Finance Minister AHM Mustafa Kamal on Wednesday said that he did not receive any proposal from International Monetary Fund (IMF) to increase the prices of petroleum and power as a precondition of getting loan.
“The IMF did not give any proposal for hiking the prices of power and petroleum as a precondition of providing loan,” the minister during his briefing over two consecutive meetings of the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs and Cabinet Committee on Government Purchase on Wednesday.
Journalists’ query to the finance minister was referring to a media report that IMF proposed to hike the prices of petroleum and power as precondition of providing a $4.5 billion bailout loan to Bangladesh.
The finance minister asked the journalists not to file any misleading information for the sake of the interest of the country.
Quoting a hadith, the finance minister said ‘without loving one’s own country, a Muslim cannot be a good Muslim’.
Mustafa Kamal defended his stance about a government move to allow the whitening of black money saying ‘money turns black due to the system’.
The finance minister claimed that everything of the economy is moving on the right track and the country’s economy will return to a stable position within months.
Replying to another question of raising prices of daily essentials, he said not only our country; many countries in the world including the European ones have been experiencing high inflation in this time.
