Iraq must be given at least 18 months without any payments on its crippling external debt, US Treasury Undersecretary John Taylor has said. "The first thing to do is to make sure that we are not going to start requiring service payments on that debt in, say, the next year and a half," Taylor told a conference. "Certainly for the short term -- a year and a half at least -- there is really no expectation that payments will be made," he told the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
Taylor, the Treasury Department's undersecretary for international affairs, said the scale of Iraq's debt mountain is still uncertain, although it is massive. Iraq's total external public debt has been estimated to be around USD 127 bn, including accrued interest, but exact government figures are lacking. //www.fxcentre.com