Fajarasia.co – Sri Lanka is struggling to secure supplies of fresh fuel, as the crisis-hit nation of 22 million people has just 15,000 tonnes of gasoline and diesel to keep essential services running in the coming days.
“We have around 9,000 metric tons of diesel and 6,000 metric tons of gasoline left. We are doing everything we can to get new stockpiles, but we don’t know when that will happen,” Sri Lanka’s Minister of Energy and Energy Kanchana Wijesekera told reporters on Monday. (27/6/2022).
The island nation is facing its worst financial crisis in seven decades with foreign exchange reserves at record lows making it difficult to pay for important imported commodities including fuel, food and medicine.
According to Wijesekera, his country is now struggling to find suppliers because many of them are reluctant to accept letters of credit from Sri Lankan banks.
It said there were more than US$700 million (approximately Rp. 10.4 trillion) in payments that were due, so now suppliers want an upfront payment.
In the past two months, Sri Lanka has mostly received fuel through India’s US$500 million line of credit, which ran out in mid-June.
Gasoline deliveries scheduled for last Thursday failed to arrive and no new deliveries have been scheduled, Wijesekera said.
However, Sri Lanka also implemented a 12-22 percent increase in fuel prices in the early hours of Sunday. The price hike in May pushed inflation to 45.3 percent, the highest since 2015.
People, already queuing outside gas stations, are unlikely to get fuel as the government will focus on releasing the remaining stock for public transportation, power generation and medical services, Wijesekera said.
The military, which has been deployed at fuel stations to quell the riots, will now issue tokens to those who wait, sometimes for days. Meanwhile, the ports and airports will be given a share of fuel, said Wijesekera.
Separately, the government on Sunday asked about one million civil servants to work from home until further notice.
The main delegation from the US Treasury and State Department arrived in Colombo for a three-day visit on Sunday to assess the situation.
A team from the International Monetary Fund is already in Sri Lanka to discuss a possible $3 billion bailout package.****
