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Kuwait denies Mauritania exemption on debt interest

April 26, 2019 at 3:28 am

Kuwait denied news saying that it exempted Mauritania from debt interest, pointing out that it had replaced interests with investment opportunities.

Kuwait’s Ministry of Finance asserted in a statement on Thursday that the memorandum of understanding signed with Mauritania on Tuesday aimed at settling Nouakchott’s indebtedness to Kuwait “with the possibility of replacing the debt’s interest with exclusive Kuwaiti investment opportunities in Mauritania.”

In the statement, which Anadolu monitored, it added that what is being circulated by the media about Kuwait’s exemption of Mauritania from the interests of the debt is “incorrect.”

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It explained that “after more than 40 years, a mechanism to recover the debt was agreed upon as the Mauritanian side stopped paying since 1990.”

On Tuesday, the Mauritanian News Agency announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding between the two countries to settle Nouakchott’s debt to Kuwait, on the sidelines of the visit of President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, which he concluded on Wednesday, without providing details of that agreement.

There are no official Mauritanian figures on the amount of debt due to Kuwait, but economic experts estimated it at about two billion dollars, most of which date back to the seventies of the last century, according to Mauritanian media.

In the meantime, Kuwaiti media said that the debt is estimated at more than 4 billion dollars.