IMF team to visit country next month to negotiate new bailout package: Pak Fin Min

Earlier, Aurangzeb said that Pakistan can repay its debt to Beijing only after completing the second phase of the multi-million dollar CPEC

Pakistan's Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb has said that an IMF team is expected to visit Islamabad next month to negotiate a new long-term bailout package to secure a staff-level agreement for the cash-strapped country by mid-July.

Speaking to the media after his week-long visit to Washington, the minister said the contours of the new International Monetary Fund programme will shape up later. "We will start getting into the granularity of the programme by mid-May," Dawn News quoted Aurangzeb as saying on Saturday.

Cash-strapped Pakistan has made a formal request to the IMF to seek the next bailout package in the range of $6 to $8 billion with the possibility of augmentation through climate financing.

Addressing journalists at the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, Aurangzeb expressed the hope that the global lender's board of governors would convene to consider the last tranche of the current programme by the end of this month, with the final instalment released shortly thereafter. In earlier statements, Aurangzeb had said Pakistan would prefer a long-term, preferably a three-year programme.