Sri Lanka’s Chinese debt making international headlines

(The Island, Colombo, 9 September 2022) Sri Lanka’s debt to China is making headlines in international and local media again. Media reports partly blame China and its lending practices, for Sri Lanka’s debt crisis, says a Verité Research media release. It said: The publication titled: “The Lure of Chinese Loans: Sri Lanka’s experiment with a special framework to finance its infrastructure” sheds light on the perils of creating frameworks to facilitate deviations from competitive bidding to tap into concessional export credit from emerging economies such as China. The report analyses the design and execution of the special framework and finds that the lack of rigour in the evaluation process and the ability of decision-makers to exercise excessive discretion made the framework highly prone to abuse and misuse.