An alarmed Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is providing $13 million in retroactive financing to prevent a “cash flow shortfall” from bringing the New Providence Road Improvement Project to a temporary halt.
A report on a proposed $65 million IDB loan, necessary to provide the financing to complete the project, said that without bridging a $77 million ‘funding gap’, the civil works budget would be “depleted” as of this month.
The IDB report indicated that its total lending to the Bahamas with respect to the New Providence Road Improvement Project might even exceed $206 million.
Noting that it had provided initial financing of $62 million when the project was first conceived in 2001, the IDB said this was supplemented by a further $100 million loan in May 2008, giving an “amalgamated budget of $162 million”. Now, the proposed $65 million loan would, on the surface, take the Bahamas’ total borrowing from the IDB for just this project to $227 million.
