Dept prioritising funds

TREASURY secretary Dairi Vele says the delay in releasing the K80 million in SME (small to medium enterprise) funding which the Government had appropriated for the National Development Bank (NDB) is due to large salary (Government) bills.
“We are going on cash flow and one of the big issues that we always have is our salaries,” Vele said.
“Every week, we have a big salaries bill so we try and make sure that we do it on a week that there is no salary,” he said.
Vele said the that money would be prioritised and the best time for the money to be released to NDB would be when they were ready to put the money up for soft lending to take place.
“We don’t want the money to be sitting there doing nothing,” he said.
“If there’s a hospital that needs K20 million for medicine and NDB is not ready to put that money up than the hospital will be prioritised first.
“Then, when NDB says definitely when it gets here, I’ll put that money up, then that’s probably the best time.”
It is understood that once the money is made available, it will be given to the Department of Commerce and Industry (DCI) to present to NDB.
The K80 million is from the K200 million SME funding soft lending facility which K100 million was appropriated for Bank South Pacific (BSP), K80 million for NDB and K20 million for DCI for specific projects.
BSP has already received K100 million which is kept in a trust for security to allow the bank to rollout soft lending.
NDB says it already has plans to rollout out once the money is given to them.