Oman raises OMR68.6m through treasury bills

Oman’s central bank raised OMR68.6 million by way of allotting treasury bills on Tuesday.

The treasury bills are for a maturity period of 28 days, from December 27 until January 24, 2018.

The average accepted price reached 99.909 for every OMR100, and the minimum accepted price arrived at 99.895 per OMR100. Whereas the average discount rate and the average yield reached 1.18158 per cent and 1.18266 per cent, respectively.

The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is 2.064 per cent for the period from December 26 to January 23, 2018 while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 2.814 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.