Biden administration tries to stop $ 450 million from flowing into Taliban

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The Treasury Department is taking action to prevent the Taliban from accessing IMF funds, a Treasury official told CNN on Wednesday.

They note that this “would provide nearly half a billion dollars in unconditional liquidity to a regime used to supporting terrorist actions against the United States and its allies.”

GOP lawmakers, including the representative for French Hill of Arkansas, requested an update from Yellen by 5 p.m. ET Thursday.

The Secretary of the Treasury cannot act unilaterally here. This is a question that concerns all members of the IMF, which includes 190 member countries, including Russia, China and Iran.

The controversy concerns a previously scheduled allocation of the IMF’s own currency, known as Special Drawing Rights. SDRs can be exchanged for US dollars, euros, yen, Chinese yuan, and British pounds. The value of an SDR is fixed daily, based on a basket of currencies.

If no action is taken, SDRs worth around $ 450 million are expected to be allocated to Afghanistan as early as Monday, in bank accounts on Tuesday or Wednesday.

Even the apparent head of the Afghan central bank is not sure what will happen next.

“I don’t know if this allocation will now continue,” said Adjmal Ahmady, the acting governor of the Central Bank of Afghanistan. Twitter Wednesday. Ahmady said he fled the country on Sunday as the government collapsed.
Typically, when there is a dispute over who is in power in a country ready to receive SDRs, the IMF asks its members how to proceed. In 2019, the IMF cut Venezuela off of the $ 400 million in cash held in the funds after a majority of its members refused to recognize Nicolas Maduro’s government.

Since the collapse of the Afghan government, the United States, United Kingdom and Canada have been quick to say that they do not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of the nation. But it’s unclear where other key nations, including Russia and China, will be on this.

The IMF and the Treasury Department declined to comment.

The United States has already taken steps to prevent even more money going to the Taliban. Officials told CNN earlier this week that the Treasury Department essentially blocked assets held by the Afghan Central Bank out of the reach of the Taliban.



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