Sri Lanka is in discussions with the International Monetary Fund on a new programme to follow the current Extended Fund Facility, Deputy Finance Minister Anil Jayantha told Parliament on Thursday, EconomyNext reported.
He said the existing facility is on course to finish as planned.
“The current IMF EFF program is on track to conclude successfully in March 2027, marking the completion of its economic reform and recovery efforts under the arrangements.”
On what would follow, he described a change in the nature of the relationship rather than a continuation of the present one.
“In parallel, discussions are currently underway regarding the options beyond the current program, reflecting a shift from crisis-driven support towards a more sustainable, long-term growth-targeted engagement model.”
The statement was made in response to a question raised by the Opposition.
Why a successor programme is a live question
The four-year, US$3 billion Extended Fund Facility was agreed after Sri Lanka’s economy collapsed and the country defaulted on its sovereign debt for the first time in April 2022. Depleted foreign reserves, years of loose fiscal policy, deep tax cuts, the organic farming mandate that damaged agricultural yields and the pandemic left the island unable to service an external debt stock of about US$51 billion.
The facility came with conditions across tax, cost-reflective energy pricing, expenditure control and central bank independence, alongside a sovereign debt restructuring negotiated with bilateral creditors including China, India and Japan.
The significance of Thursday’s statement is therefore less that talks are happening than how the government is framing them. A programme described as “growth-targeted” rather than crisis-driven implies a different set of conditions from the current one — but the Deputy Minister named none of them.
Context in Parliament this week
The statement came in the same sitting week in which the 2027 Appropriation Bill had its First Reading, setting next year’s voted expenditure at Rs. 4,992.77 billion and capping outstanding borrowing at Rs. 3,800 billion. The Budget Speech, the Bill’s Second Reading, falls on 12 November — within the window in which the current facility is still running.
Not reported: the filing does not say what form the successor arrangement might take, whether it would involve new IMF financing or be a non-financing arrangement, when a decision is expected, or whether the IMF has responded. It does not identify the Opposition member who asked the question. It gives no indication of whether the eighth and final reviews of the current facility have been scheduled. No other verified newsroom had filed on the statement at the time of writing, so this article rests on a single source.
