Bulgaria has received 474,586,534 Special Drawing Rights (SDR) from the IMF (about 517 million euro), which increased the foreign exchange reserves of the Bulgarian National Bank (BNB), its press office said.

At the April summit in London of the Group of Twenty (G-20) industrial and emerging market countries, state and government leaders called for an SDR allocation equivalent to 250,000 million dollars among the IMF member states as part of the anti-crisis package, the BNB said. This entitles each IMF member state to SDR to the amount of up to 75 per cent of its IMF quota.

In line with this decision, the proposed general allocation was approved by the IMF's Board of Governors on August 7. In his capacity as the IMF Governor for Bulgaria, the BNB Governor voted for the Resolution, expressing the joint position of the government and the central bank.

A special one-time SDR allocation of 136.3 million will be made to Bulgaria on September 9. The special one-time allocation equivalent to about 33,000 million dollars, separate and additional to any SDRs allocated to members under the general allocation of SDRs, was proposed in 1997 and became effective for all members on August 10, 2009 when the Fund certified that at least three-fifths of the IMF membership (112 members) with 85 per cent of the total voting power accepted it.

Source: BTA