October 5 (SeeNews) - Bulgaria's Finance Minister Simeon Dyankov said the government in Sofia plans to issue Eurobonds next year to meet its external financing needs, Dow Jones Newswires reported late on Sunday.
"On the expenditure side and on the price side, Eurobonds are starting to look promising... we are seriously considering one in the spring," Dyankov told Dow Jones Newswires in an interview at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) annual meeting in Istanbul, Turkey.
Dyankov added that the Eurobonds' size and maturity would be determined once discussions on the country's 2010 budge had concluded in November.
Bulgaria relied on foreign funding for a quarter of its gross domestic product last year.
Dyankov also said that the country is increasingly unlikely to seek an emergency loan from the IMF. The decision not to tap the IMF was more straightforward because Bulgaria would not qualify for the multilateral lender's new flexible credit lines, which offer loans without intrusive policy prescriptions, he added.
He also said that the government will formally apply for membership of the Exchange Rate Mechanism II (ERM II), the two-year waiting room for the adoption of the euro, "very soon".
Dyankov said earlier this year that Sofia will apply to join the ERM II in November.
Since July 1997 Bulgaria has been operating an IMF-prescribed currency board system, a tight monetary arrangement that ties the level of cash in circulation to the amount of central bank foreign exchange reserves. The fixed exchange rate of the Bulgarian lev under the system is 1.95583 per euro.