CBO issues treasury bills worth OMR59 million

Muscat: Oman’s central bank raised OMR59 million by way of allotting treasury bills on Tuesday.

The treasury bills are for a maturity period of 182 days, starting from April 28, 2021, Wednesday until October 27, 2021.

The average accepted price reached 99.601 for every OMR100, and the minimum accepted price arrived at 99.575 per cent OMR100. The average discount rate and the average yield reached 0.80050 per cent and 0.80371 per cent, respectively.

Treasury bills are short-term highly secured financial instruments issued by the Ministry of Finance, and they provide licensed commercial banks the opportunity to invest their surplus funds. The Central Bank of Oman (CBO) acts as the Issue Manager and provides the added advantage of ready liquidity through discounting and repurchase facilities (Repo).

It may be noted that the interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is 0.5 per cent while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 0.75 per cent.

Furthermore, treasury bills promote the local money market by creating a benchmark yield curve for short-term interest rates. Additionally, the government may also resort to this instrument whenever felt necessary for financing its recurrent expenditures.