Saudi Arabia plans to provide Pakistan with financial support, Saudi Minister of Finance Mohammed al-Jadaan said, as the kingdom looks to help shore up alliances with countries struggling with the effects of rising inflation.
The Saudi Arabian government is to “continue to support Pakistan as much as we can,” al-Jadaan said at a news conference in Riyadh.
The kingdom has taken several steps to provide financial support to countries in the region as it looks to bolster allies and cement new relationships.
Photo: AFP
Earlier this month, it extended the term of a US$3 billion deposit to boost foreign currency reserves and help Pakistan overcome economic repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Saudi Arabia is also looking to make more investments in Egypt and is planning to initiate deals in Turkey, al-Jadaan said.
“Our relationship with Turkey is improving greatly, and we hope to have investment opportunities,” he said. “We have started investing aggressively in Egypt and we will continue to look at investment opportunities and that is more important than deposits. Deposits can be pulled, but investments stay.”
Saudi Arabia is in the final stages of agreeing to deposit US$5 billion at Turkey’s central bank, the finance ministry said last month, a major boost for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s bid to keep the country’s currency stable ahead of presidential elections next year.
The agreement would crown a recent rapprochement that ended years of hostility between the Turkish and Saudi Arabian governments.
It also extended the maturity of a US$5 billion deposit with Egypt’s central bank last month, and the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund is also looking into US$10 billion of potential investments in Egypt’s healthcare, education, agriculture and financial sectors, the Egyptian Cabinet said in a statement.
The momentum of talks between the countries’ central banks comes after a joint effort by Saudia Arabia and Turkey to mend ties that were ruptured after the murder of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 at the kingdom’s Istanbul consulate.
Additional reporting by Reuters
Drug lord Jose Adolfo Macias Villamar, alias “Fito,” was Ecuador’s most-wanted fugitive before his arrest on Wednesday, more than a year after he escaped prison from where he commanded the country’s leading criminal gang. The former taxi driver turned crime boss became the prime target of law enforcement early last year after escaping from a prison in the southwestern port of Guayaquil. Ecuadoran President Daniel Noboa’s government released “wanted” posters with images of his face and offered US$1 million for information leading to his capture. In a country plagued by crime, members of Fito’s gang, Los Choneros, have responded with violence, using car
The team behind the long-awaited Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile yesterday published their first images, revealing breathtaking views of star-forming regions as well as distant galaxies. More than two decades in the making, the giant US-funded telescope sits perched at the summit of Cerro Pachon in central Chile, where dark skies and dry air provide ideal conditions for observing the cosmos. One of the debut images is a composite of 678 exposures taken over just seven hours, capturing the Trifid Nebula and the Lagoon Nebula — both several thousand light-years from Earth — glowing in vivid pinks against orange-red backdrops. The new image
Two former Chilean ministers are among four candidates competing this weekend for the presidential nomination of the left ahead of November elections dominated by rising levels of violent crime. More than 15 million voters are eligible to choose today between former minister of labor Jeannette Jara, former minister of the interior Carolina Toha and two members of parliament, Gonzalo Winter and Jaime Mulet, to represent the left against a resurgent right. The primary is open to members of the parties within Chilean President Gabriel Boric’s ruling left-wing coalition and other voters who are not affiliated with specific parties. A recent poll by the
CYBERCRIME, TRAFFICKING: A ‘pattern of state failures’ allowed the billion-dollar industry to flourish, including failures to investigate human rights abuses, it said Human rights group Amnesty International yesterday accused Cambodia’s government of “deliberately ignoring” abuses by cybercrime gangs that have trafficked people from across the world, including children, into slavery at brutal scam compounds. The London-based group said in a report that it had identified 53 scam centers and dozens more suspected sites across the country, including in the Southeast Asian nation’s capital, Phnom Penh. The prison-like compounds were ringed by high fences with razor wire, guarded by armed men and staffed by trafficking victims forced to defraud people across the globe, with those inside subjected to punishments including shocks from electric batons, confinement