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DOF eyes bond float before yearend
The Department of Finance is looking at possibly floating a bond before the end of the year.
The bond rating for the CNMI government has yet to be released but the department is looking to float the bond soon, according to Finance Secretary David Atalig last Wednesday.
Atalig told Saipan Tribune that, as of publication, his office has yet to receive the bond rating for the Commonwealth government.
A bond rating is a rating from independent agencies—in this case from Moody’s Investor Service—that measures the financial capability of the Commonwealth government to issue a bond and its ability to make interest payments and repay the principal of the bond.
Once the ratings have been received, Atalig explained, it goes out to the government’s bond consultants as well as its bond issuers.
“We will be meeting with investors to hopefully sell our debt, our bond, and hopefully…that would be accomplished…by mid-December 2019,” he said in an separate interview last weekend.
In an earlier statement, Atalig said that the CNMI government would be floating a bond of up to $65 million strictly for pension benefits.
“We are authorized up to $300 million, however, I only want to float what I need,” he had said.
He noted that the $65 million would be just enough to pay for the $17.6 million Alternative Payment of a Greater Amount payments for fiscal year 2017 and $43 million for fiscal year 2020 minimum payments to the Settlement Fund.
“This allows us to pay them and it allows us to use revenues coming in for the fiscal year to take care of [other] obligations that we’ve had. The goal is to retire the deficit from the last two fiscal years,” he said.
“With the bond that we get and, hopefully, with the additional economic activities—we ended austerity so people have more money in their pockets to spend—hopefully all of this will generate more activity in our island community,” he said.
