Fiji received cash budget support grants of around $430 million during the COVID-19 pandemic, says the Ministry of Economy permanent secretary Shiri Gounder.
He made the comment while speaking during the submission on the audit report on compliance audits relating to COVID-19 response.
Mr Goundar said the audit was done at a very early stage of the COVID-19 period in Fiji.
“This audit is basically talking about $23 million of that entire $430 million in budget support grant that was received during the COVID period so the audit was done at a very, very early stage of the COVID period,” he said.
“For Fiji, we had the first case in March, and that’s when we had the lockdown of the country, then we prepared the COVID-19 response budget and this was the early initial phase of the aid that the government started receiving.”
He said the audit and the management of the COVID-19 aid which was audited by the Office of the Auditor General focused on less than 5 per cent of the aid that was received by government.
“Having said that, during the same period we also accessed for the first time in our history, a lot of concessional loans and in the past three COVID-19 generally government’s all borrowings from the multilateral partners and bilateral partners have been based on market rate interest rates.
“In the COVID period, given the challenges we were facing a number of development partners, namely the World Bank, the JAICA, and now the ADB have come on board to provide extremely highly concessional loans to government.”
