FINANCE minister Mthuli Ncube says the Treasury’s plans to raise funds through the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange (VFEX) have been paused due to high costs associated with insurance.
The minister last year said his office had plans to raise as much as US$100 million through bonds on the US dollar-denominated exchange.
The funds that would be raised through the tranched bonds were earmarked for road rehabilitation and irrigation infrastructure as a supplement to the national budget.
“We started working on that bond… and we slowed down the process because of the cost of providing insurance,” Ncube told journalists last week.
“What we wanted to do was to buy some insurance globally, that could have raised the credit standing of the bond but then it turned out that the insurance was so high and in fact, it was just as high as the extra yield we have had to pay as a government without insurance.”