Zimbabwe to use IMF funds to support beleaguered currency

The government will hold back $500m of the $961m IMF funds to support the currency which has plunged.

Zimbabwe will use more than half of the $961 million allocated by the International Monetary Fund in the form of special drawing rights to support its beleaguered currency. The government abandoned a 1:1 peg between a precursor of the reintroduced Zimbabwe dollar and the greenback in February 2019. The currency now trades at 85.82 to the U.S. dollar and even lower on the black market, a plunge that’s made it difficult for the government to get it accepted locally, and it’s generally not tradable outside the country. “For the support of the currency we want to hold back about $500 million,” Mthuli Ncube, Zimbabwe’s finance minister, said in an interview on Tuesday.