Somalia’s Auditor-General has accused the federal Ministry of Finance of borrowing millions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) without seeking parliamentary approval.
Auditor-General Mohamed Ali Afgoi stated this when he published the latest financial reports for the government.
In his report, Auditor-General Afgoi said that the finance ministry borrowed $96.4 million from the IMF in ex-President Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo’s administration.
Dr. Abdirahman Beileh was the finance minister at the time.
He accused Dr. Beileh’s finance ministry of colluding with the Central Bank of Somalia (CBS) to borrow the funds under the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) arrangement.
In 2021, IMF allocated $650 billion in SDR.
The funds were designed to help countries around the world to overcome the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which was ravaging the world economy at the time.
Afgoi said that the Office of the Auditor-General had not seen any documentation showing that the federal parliament approved the borrowing of such large funds.
