The Governor of the Central Bank of Libya, Al-Sidiq Al-Kabir called on the Speaker of the House of Representatives (HoR), Aqila Saleh, for the necessity of approving a unified government, unifying spending, and issuing a decision to devalue the dinar exchange rate to US dollar (USD) to address the current crisis.
Al-Kabir’s call came in a letter, in which he proposed adjusting the exchange rate to between 5.95 dinars and 6.15 dinars per dollar, thus devaluing the dinar as the current rate stands at 4.80 dinars per 1USD. He asked Saleh to impose 27% fees on the official exchange rate for all purposes except in sectors funded by the public treasury – a de facto devaluation of the dinar.
The CBL Governor indicated that this step was to collect an amount of 12 billion dinars to pay off the debt and for development projects. He expected that the volume of demand for the dollar this year would be about $36 billion, compared to oil revenues of $24 billion, meaning that the deficit would be very large.
The Governor indicated that expenditures for 2023 alone amounted to 165 billion dinars, with unknown-sources parallel spending, which increased the demand for foreign currency exchange.
