Minister of Finance Fernando Alvarez Bogaert said the government seeks a dollar loan to make an important RD$1.4 billion (US$82 million) payment on its debt to power producers. “It is not about pesos, it will have a high content of dollars. To take those pesos out of circulation is not convenient because one of the great achievements of this government is to have kept interest rates low,” said Alvarez Bogaert. He also said that the government is negotiating with the power sector to exchange taxes for debt. And the government aqueducts division is also negotiating a debt for the use of water with the power producers to lower the debt. Meanwhile, Luis Molina Achecar, president of the BHD bank, said that the impact of borrowing pesos on the interest rate would depend on the matching measures implemented simultaneously by the government to compensate for the borrowing. Andres Aybar, president of the Banco Mercantil, estimated that the banks could lend pesos to the government at 17-20% and dollars at 12-14%. The interest rate would depend on the guarantees offered by the government.
