Franco Uccelli, reporting for the Bear Stearns brokerage firm, reports that the completion of the first review under the country’s current stand-by agreement with the IMF will be delayed until late July. He explains that while a government delegation traveled to Washington last week in hopes of completing the review, the delegation “quickly realized that a number of loose ends, including the reconciliation and adjustment of some ‘basic figures’, still had to be tied before the review could be completed.”
Uccelli states that his sources indicate that this week, the government plans to fine-tune its preliminary economic estimates for the first quarter and make further progress on a new letter of intent so that IMF officials may start working on the review documentation they must submit to the Fund’s Executive Board for its consideration as early as next week. He explains that although delays in IMF program reviews are not unusual, the Dominican government was hoping to facilitate the expeditious completion of the process as a way of sending a signal to the market that its IMF program was very much on track.
Uccelli states that the government’s inability to foster the necessary conditions to finalize the review, as well as its acknowledgement that preliminary estimates for the first quarter must be reconciled and adjusted, could be lending validity to private sector claims that the government may have miscalculated some of its initial performance estimates.