Sri Lankaaffected by the worst economic crisis in its history, received on Saturday russian oil to relaunch its only refinery, declared the energy minister.
the national refinery Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) was closed in March after a shortage of liquidity in Sri Lanka, which prevented the government from financing its imports, especially crude oil.
The crude in Russian It had been blocked for more than a month in front of the port of the capital Colombo, since the country was not in a position to raise 75 million dollars to pay for the supply, said the Minister of Energy, Kanchana Wijesekera.
The 90,000 tons of Siberian light crude that will feed the refinery in Sri Lankawere acquired on credit through a Dubai-based broker, Coral Energy.
Wijesekera specified that this refinery already had defaults of 735 million dollars with its suppliers.
According to him, Siberian crude is not perfectly suitable for the refinery, which is optimized for Iranian light crude, but no other supplier was willing to give credit to the country.
The population of 22 million people Sri Lanka It also faces severe shortages of imported food and pharmaceutical products, record inflation and long daily power outages.
kg
