Hoarding dollars — the missing $1bn

With the government scrambling for dollars, knocking one door after the other to raise cash to keep the ongoing balance of payment crisis from morphing into a sovereign default, not less than a billion dollars in ‘overdue export proceeds’ remain to be repatriated. The overdue export proceeds are those where an exporter is unable to repatriate their export revenues within 90-120 days from the date of shipment or within such periods as may be determined for the purpose by the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) for a particular sector, as notified from time to time, or on the due date of the bill whichever is earlier. “The amount of $1 billion in overdue export proceeds is the one that is stuck in the SBP’s adjudication process. The actual amount of delayed export revenues could be three times bigger than that,” a senior banker who deals with such cases on behalf of his bank tells this correspondent.