Muscat: A tender of Government Treasury Bills, issue number 441, was held at the Central Bank of Oman (CBO) this week. The total value of the allotted Treasury bills amounted to OMR15 million, for a maturity period of 91 days, from February 24 until May 25, 2016.
The average accepted price reached 99.742 for every OMR100, while the minimum accepted price arrived at 99.730 per OMR100. Whereas the average discount rate and the average yield reached 1.03484 per cent and 1.03751 per cent, respectively.
The Treasury bills are short-term highly secured financial instruments issued by the CBO on behalf of the Government, which helps the licenced 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.
Furthermore, the 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.
The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is one per cent for the period from 23/02/2016 to 29/02/2016, while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 1.75 per cent, for the same period.