Azernews.Az

The Azerbaijani government's new policy on foreign borrowing is aimed at tightening the requirements for those parties preparing new projects, a source in the government told Trend news agency on Tuesday.

"New projects must be carefully prepared," a source said. "The goals, objectives and operations must be clearly defined. This concerns not only the international financial institutions which give loans, but state agencies which want to attract these funds."

According to the source, there are cases of slow delivery of the funds within some projects with international financial institutions.

"The allocated funds are being developed slowly as further work and mechanisms for their implementation have not been precisely determined while preparing the project," the source said. "The funds are not mastered. The process of paying off the loans is underway. The requirements for new projects will be tightened to avoid these types of cases."

In his speech at the meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers dedicated to the social and economic development in the first half of 2012, President Ilham Aliyev said that Azerbaijan should be more cautious while attracting additional loans.

"The external debt is at a very low level," the president said. "It stands at seven per cent of the gross domestic product. This is one of the most positive indices in the world scale.

"Despite this, I have instructed that we must be more careful while attracting additional loans. Today, we give the loans and this is a positive phenomenon from a political and an economic points of view."