Kuwait’s parliament approves Credit Bank capital hike

Kuwait’s parliament on Tuesday unanimously approved a legislative amendment to increase by 300 million dinars ($993.31 million) the capital of the state-run Kuwait Credit Bank to offer more financial support for residential housing.

Parliament Speaker Marzouq al-Ghanim said the amendment would boost the bank’s capital to 3.3 billion dinars and also provide it with additional 800 million dinars in liquidity.

A proposal submitted by the housing and real estate committee had aimed to increase Credit Bank’s capital by 750 million dinars.

The bank provides interest-free loans to eligible citizens to build, buy or renovate housing but it has been suffering for years from a lack of liquidity because of rising housing requests.

Providing this liquidity to the Credit Bank will allow it to provide housing support to “thousands of families” in the new residential areas, the rapporteur of the Parliamentary Housing Committee said before the session.

Kuwait’s government has also agreed to reschedule 500 million dinars in bonds owed by the Credit Bank to the Kuwait Fund for Development and is working to allow the bank to issue one billion dinars bonds, the finance minister Abulwahab Mohammed Al Rushaid told the parliament.

($1 = 0.3020 Kuwaiti dinars)Reporting by Ahmed Hagagy; writing by Shakeel Ahmad and Lina Najem; editing by Jason Neely, Louise Heavens and Tomasz Janowski

This article was originally published by Reuters.