UNITED NATIONS, September 10 -- The International Monetary Fund through spokesman David Hawley repeated on Thursday that despite its recent allocation to Honduras of $168 million in Special Drawing Rights, "the regime in de facto control is not able to use [the allocation] until a decision is made if the Fund will deal with" the regime as the government of Honduras.
But Hawley also said that he has "no details on how individual countries have used the allocation," and when asked if countries have to disclose if they convert SDRs into hard currency, he said, I'll have to get back to you. So still the IMF's approach to Honduras, as well as other countries with coups and de facto regimes, remains unclear.
At the IMF's regular press briefing on September 10, Inner City Press submitted three questions, including "Please clarify the conditions under which a government of Honduras could access the SDRs voted to the country on August 28? Could the Micheletti government never do so? Or after a new election" without UN observers?
Mr. Hawley read the first part of the question out loud, and then flipped through a binder to repeat a line the IMF e-mailed to the Press on Sunday. Left unanswered is who will make the decision about the Honduran government and its right to the allocated SDRs, when the decision will be made, and in light of Hawley's other answers, how any decision, including the current supposed prohibition, would be policed.
The President the UN General Assembly, which passed a resolution on Honduras after the coup, says that no country or body like the IMF can recognize the Micheletti government, or send observers to an election it organizes. Does the IMF mean that its executive board could decide, tomorrow, to recognize Micheletti? Or that to recognize a government elected in a Micheleti organized election?
Earlier this week, UNCTAD released a report criticizing the IMF at length. Inner City Press submitted this question:
"While the IMF says that "conditionality" is a thing of the past, this week's UNCTAD report criticizes the IMF for imposing "restrictive financial policies" on Latvia, Serbia, Georgia and Hungary. What is the IMF's response?"
While Hawley for some reason declined to even read this question out, during the briefing he said he and the IMF have no response to the UNCTAD report. This is more than a little strange. During the briefing, as simply one example, Hawley described how in connection with an IMF package for Ukraine, gas prices to consumers had to be raised. Labor unions are fighting it, he said, but the authorities are litigating to get the gas price rises in place and the IMF is monitoring it.
On September 8, Inner City Press posed questions about the IMF to Heiner Flassbeck from the UN Conference on Trade and Development, video here. Flassbeck laughed when told of the IMF's denials of conditionality. For this and other reasons, it would seem the IMF would have a response. Watch this site.
Footnote: Caroline Atkinson, who has presided over the IMF's past four or five press briefings, was said to be in Turkey, a country for which the IMF is considering a package. Based on Thursday's briefing by Mr. Hawley, it seems that while Ms. Atkinson is at least willing to extemporize IMF responses to question for which there is no "if-asked" ready in her binder, Mr. Hawley declines live questions for which no written answer is ready, and edits out or censors questions submitted electronically if he does not want to answer them. We'll see.
