By Imesh Ranasinghe Courtesy The Morning

• IMF emphasises need for a legal framework to facilitate recovery

Sri Lanka’s delegation meeting with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the US saw successful talks on retrieving stolen assets, IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said.

At an event with the Civil Societies ahead of the IMF-World Bank annual meetings, she said that one of the topics that the IMF discussed with the delegation from Sri Lanka is how to be successful in anti-money laundering.

She said it was looking into ways of getting back assets that were stolen from people.

Georgieva said that the IMF would certainly like to do that with every other country which has impacted, where Ecuador is at top of the list.

The IMF has already asked Sri Lanka to create an Asset Recovery Framework which the previous government intended to put out as a law.

The lack of a legal framework to recover stolen public funds presents a significant challenge. Enacting a modern asset recovery law will empower authorities to seize illicit assets domestically and abroad,” the IMF said in their Governance Diagnostic Report on Sri Lanka.

Further, Georgieva said that Sri Lanka has democratically appointed a new government with a new president and new team with continuity of reforms where inflation is down, reserves up and opportunities in the country are getting better.

What Sri Lanka shows is broadly what we see globally, the big global inflation wave is now in retreat without tipping the global economy into recession, inflation rates may be down but the impact of higher prices is here to stay,” she said.