Oman raises OMR48m via treasury bills

Muscat: Oman’s central bank has raised OMR48 million through an issue of treasury bills this week. The treasury bills are with a maturity period of 91 days, from September 20, until December 20, 2017. The average accepted price reached 99.707 for every OMR100, while the minimum accepted price arrived at 99.705 per OMR100. Whereas the average discount rate and the average yield reached 1.17697 per cent and 1.18044 per cent, respectively. The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is 1.736 per cent for the period from September 19 to September 25, while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 2.486 per cent, for the same period.
The Treasury Bills are short-term highly secured financial instruments issued by the CBO on behalf of the Government, which helps the licensed commercial banks to gainfully invest their surplus funds, with added advantage of ready liquidity through discounting and repurchase facilities (Repo) offered by the Central Bank.
Further, Treasury Bills promote the local money market by creating a benchmark yield curve for short-term interest rates. Additionally, the Government (MOF) may also resort to this instrument whenever felt necessary for financing its recurrent expenditures.
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