The United Arab Emirates is seeking revenge on Pakistan for refusing to normalize relations with the occupying regime.
According to credible sources eligible for the Emirates Leaks website, the UAE has launched punitive measures against the Pakistani government for refusing Islamabad from Abu Dhabi’s mediation to normalize with the occupying regime.
The UAE has called on Imran Khan’s government, which is struggling with monetary problems, to immediately repay the $ 1 billion owed by Abu Dhabi to the Central Bank of Pakistan to put pressure on them.
The UAE deposited the amount in the Central Bank of Pakistan and after the deadline, Abu Dhabi requested that the same amount be returned immediately.
The UAE request comes as a shock to Pakistan, which is mired in deep international debt, forcing Islamabad to ask for a deadline.
According to the Emirates Leaks website, the UAE refused to grant any deadline to Pakistan.
“Leave this [question]. There are things we cannot say. We have good relations with them,” Khan told the interviewer as quoted by Anadolu Agency.
The UAE and Bahrain recently established diplomatic and economic relations with Israel. Some other Gulf countries, including Saudi Arabia, are also weighing options to normalize relations, the news agency reported.
Let us stand on our own feet in terms of the economy, then you may ask these questions,” Khan further said, referring to Islamabad’s longstanding economic dependence on the oil-rich Gulf states.
The $1 billion loan was a part of the $6.2 billion initial bailouts that the UAE had announced in late 2018, helping the government of Prime Minister Imran Khan to avoid default on international debt obligations.
“Pakistan and the UAE are great friends and we are confident of a rollover”, Finance Secretary Kamran Ali Afzal said, while responding to a query whether the UAE extended $1 billion support for one more year.
The loan matured on Friday. A senior ministry official said that the money was not going back and the UAE has informed Pakistan that it would roll over the $1 billion.
The financial assistance packages announced by Saudi Arabia and the UAE helped Pakistan to buy time to negotiate a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). But the implementation of the IMF deal is also stalled for the last 13 months, which is now expected to be revived in the fourth week of this month.
Pakistan had returned the Saudi loan by securing three different financing pipelines from China. Beijing gave $1 billion as a soft loan, a credit-swap financing line of $1.5 billion, and a $500 million commercial loans from the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China.
The Chinese assistance helped the State Bank of Pakistan (SBP) in maintaining the gross foreign exchange reserves of around $13 billion.
The government is currently implementing various conditions to revive the stalled IMF program. Subject to meeting all these conditions, the IMF Executive Board might approve the next tranche on March 24th.
