CBO issues treasury bills worth OMR17mn

Muscat: Oman’s central bank raised OMR17 million by way of allotting treasury bills on Tuesday.
The treasury bills are for a maturity period of 91 days, from May 1 (Wednesday), until July 31, 2019.
The average accepted price reached 99.381 for every OMR100, and the minimum accepted price arrived at 99.355 per OMR100. Whereas the average discount rate and the average yield reached 2.48091 per cent and 2.49636 per cent, respectively.
The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is 2.986 per cent for the period from April 30, 2019 to May 6, 2019 while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 3.736 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.