Kuwait

The owners of consumer delivery companies are worried about going bankrupt and falling into more debt due to the ill-considered decisions of some government agencies and the false information that some officials provide to the concerned ministers, the Arab Times Online reported. In a meeting held Saturday, the owners called for a thorough review of the decisions and circulars issued recently, which have negatively affected their commercial activity.

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The central bank of Kuwait raised its discount rate to 4% from 3.50% effective Jan. 26, it said in a statement on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The decision is in line with "recent developments in the local and international economic conditions, local monitory and banking indicators and movements on KWD interest rate in the local market considering changes to the interest rates on the other major currencies," Governor Basel Al-Haroon said in the statement. Read more.
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The Central Bank of Kuwait raised its discount rate by 25 basis points to 2.75% effective from Thursday, it said in a statement on Wednesday, Reuters reported. The decision was in response to inflationary pressures, bank Governor Basel al-Haroon said in the statement. The bank had also increased the rate by 25 bps on July 27, after a 75 bps hike by the U.S. Federal Reserve. All Gulf countries have their currencies pegged to the dollar except Kuwait, which pegs its dinar to a currency basket including the dollar.

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Thousands of small and medium Kuwaiti businesses could go to the wall after being walloped by the pandemic, potentially torpedoing a private sector central to the country's efforts to remake its unorthodox and oil-pumped economy, Reuters reported. The government, which spends more than half of its annual budget on the salaries of Kuwaitis who mostly work in state jobs, has encouraged citizens to set up their own businesses over the past decade in an effort to engineer a private sector.
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The executive regulations of the Bankruptcy Law approved by Kuwait's National Assembly a year ago were enforced as of Saturday, meaning 80,000 debtors breathed a sigh of relief as no more arrest warrants will be issued against them, Gulf News reported. The new law abolished Article 292 of the Procedure Code and does not treat failure to pay debt as a criminal offense, unless it is fraudulent.
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Kuwait’s government submitted a draft law to parliament seeking permission to withdraw as much as 5 billion dinars ($16.5 billion) a year from the country’s sovereign wealth fund to help finance a spiraling deficit, Bloomberg News reported. If approved by lawmakers, it would be the first time since the aftermath of the Gulf War in 1990 that Kuwait had extracted funds from the $600 billion Future Generations Fund. Previous withdrawals were treated as loans and had to be repaid.
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