Tokyo: Japan is to provide Myanmar with USD 615 million in government loans, a report said on Sunday, just days after the United States scrapped a ban on most imports from the long-isolated Southeast Asian nation. Myanmar nominally ended nearly half a century of military rule last year and rapid changes have sparked a widespread lifting of sanctions and a scramble to tap a potentially lucrative market.
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda will make the loans announcement when he meets Myanmar’s President Thein Sein on the sidelines on a Southeast Asian summit in Cambodia on Monday, the Nikkei business daily said.
Japan’s first low-interest, long-term government loans to Myanmar in nearly three decades will “back up moves by Japanese companies into the country and hold China in check after it increased its influence in Myanmar”, it said.
The Tokyo government has in recent years provided other Asian nations with similar low-interest, long-term loans, known as “yen loans”. In April, Japan agreed to forgive 300 billion yen of the 500 billion yen which Myanmar owed. (PTI)