The Finance Ministry is in debt swap talks with creditors / Photo from UNIAN
Ukraine's Finance Ministry says that the negotiations are still under way, they will continue in April and May.
By negotiating the restructuring of part of its external state debt and quasi-state debt worth $15.3 billion in total, Ukraine hasn't accepted some of the conditions put forth by key creditors forming a creditors' committee led by U.S. Franklin Templeton.
This is stipulated in presentation materials prepared by Ukraine's Finance Ministry.
"At the moment, the creditors' committee, consisting of five biggest bondholders with about $10 billion in total, has sent the Ukrainian side its debt restructuring terms. However, Ukraine cannot agree to some of them," the materials read.
The ministry did not give details about the issues Ukraine did not accept.
The negotiations are under way, and they will continue in April and May. One of the goals of the restructuring is to ease debt burden on the Ukrainian budget, bring the debt-to-GDP ratio to the level not exceeding 71%, and reduce expenditures to service state debt to not more than 10-12% of GDP by 2019.
As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukraine's major creditor, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), insists on the completion of the negotiations on the restructuring of part of Ukraine's foreign debt not later than in June, when the IMF mission plans to conduct the first review of the cooperation program, approved in March 2015.
The IMF stresses that the talks with the creditors are extremely important to Ukraine, and should be held in keeping with major guidelines, outlined, among others, by IMF experts.
Ukraine hasn't made clear-cut proposals to creditors, having limited to assurances that all the creditors would be given equal conditions. At the same time, some experts claim that a reduction to creditors' principal holdings by about 30-35% could be among debt restructuring terms. This condition is unacceptable to creditors. In particular, the creditors' committee headed by Franklin Templeton announced it expected "a speedy resolution" of Ukraine's liquidity issues, but planned to avoid a write-down in the debt talks.