CBO issues treasury bills worth OMR53.5mn

Muscat: Oman’s central bank raised OMR53.5 million by way of allotting treasury bills on Tuesday.
The treasury bills are for a maturity period of 28 days, from December 12, 2018 until January 9, 2019.
The average accepted price reached 99.821 for every OMR100, and the minimum accepted price arrived at 99.820 per OMR100. Whereas the average discount rate and the average yield reached 2.32694 per cent and 2.33110 per cent, respectively.
The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is 2.921 per cent for the period from December 11, 2018 to December 17, 2018 while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 3.671 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. Also, the Government (MOF) may also resort to this instrument whenever felt necessary for financing its recurrent expenditures.