According to Bangladesh Bank’s last update, the forex reserve was $31.2 billion as of June 30.
On July 7, the Bangladesh Bank is set to pay $1.1 billion in import bills through the Asian Clearing Union (ACU), further reducing the country’s Foreign Exchange (Forex) reserves.
According to the most recent Bangladesh Bank statement, the foreign reserve was at $31.2 billion as of June 30.
Md Zakir Hossain Chowdhury, the acting spokesperson for the central bank, informed that the May-June ACU payments will be made by July 7 and that the reserve will normally decrease after the ACU payments.
“We haven’t finalized the reserves yet. We have accounts open until June 30th which was $31.2 billion as of that date,” he added.
The ACU is an arrangement for settling payments for intra-regional transactions among member countries, including Bangladesh.
Other members of the Tehran-based ACU include India, Bhutan, Iran, the Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan.
However, by June 2022, Sri Lanka owed the Asian Clearing Union $1.9 billion. Sri Lanka voluntarily quit the mechanism on October 14, 2022, and Bangladeshi banks were instructed not to conduct business with the island nation through the system.
The ACU’s member countries clear their payments every two months. Concerned people believe that even after paying the ACU bill, the reserve will be slightly more than $30 billion.
Earlier in May, the Bangladesh Bank cleared $1.18 billion in Union import bills, reducing reserves to $29 billion.
However, it went up to $31 billion on June 26 after three multilateral lenders extended $925 million in loans to Bangladesh.
On August 24, 2021, the country recorded its highest reserve in history with $48.06 billion.
In addition, a higher inflow of remittances on the occasion of Eid-ul-Azha also played an important role in pushing up the reserve level last month.
Migrant workers sent home $21.61 billion in the just-concluded fiscal year, up 2.75% from the $21.03 billion remitted a year ago.
The expatriate Bangladeshis remitted about $2.2 billion in June, the highest in a single month since July 2021 when $2.6 billion entered the country.
