In the 18 months to May 2001,
it has received only $40 million in repayments.
It is still hoping to triple this trifle amount by joining the Paris
Club - as a creditor nation. The 27 countries with Paris Club
agreements owe roughly half of what Russia claims. Some of them -
Algeria in cash, Vietnam in kind - have been paying back
intermittently. Others have abstained.
Russia has spent the last two years negotiating generous package deals
- rescheduling, write-offs, grace periods measured in years - with its
most obtuse debtors. Even the likes of Yemen, Mozambique, and
Madagascar - started coughing up - though not Syria which owes $12
billion for weapons purchases two decades ago. But the result of these
Herculean efforts is meager. Russia expects to get back an extra $100
million a year. By comparison, in 1999 alone Russia received $800
million from India.
The sticking point is a communist-era fiction. When the USSR expired it
was owed well over $100 billion in terms of a fictitious accounting
currency, the "transferable ruble".
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