Dhaka, Bangladesh (BBN) – Bangladesh is in talks with the International Monetary Fund for an additional $3 billion loan.

In an interview with Bloomberg, the new governor of Bangladesh’s central bank, Ahsan H Mansur, said the loan is needed to recover from the recent political unrest the country has experienced. The bank is also buying dollars from local banks to cover unpaid debts.

Bangladesh received $4.7 billion in financing from the IMF last year. Mansur said he was in talks with the Washington-based financial institution to “increase” that amount by another $3 billion and “pay it forward,” BBC reports.

He said Bangladesh also wants $1.5 billion from the World Bank and $1 billion from the Asian Development Bank and the Japan International Cooperation Agency.

The country has only just recovered from weeks of unrest following deadly protests that led to the ousting of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina earlier this month.

The violence that accompanied the anti-government protests has disrupted garment exports, the country’s main source of foreign currency.

Reserves were already under pressure before the current crisis, standing at $20.5 billion as of July 31, just enough to cover about three months of imports, Bloomberg reports.

Dr Mansur, a veteran economist who worked at the IMF for three decades, was appointed governor of the Bangladesh Bank last week by the interim government led by Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus.

Former governor Abdur Rouf Talukder and two other deputy governors resigned as part of a series of bureaucratic departures following the fall of the previous government.

The central bank has bought more than $200 million in the interbank market in three days since Mansur was appointed governor of the Bangladesh Bank on August 13, Bloomberg reports.

Dr Mansur said the central bank aims to buy about $1 billion a month from local banks.

In the BBC interview, he stressed that cleaning up the country’s banking sector was his top priority as he spoke to the BBC at the central bank’s headquarters in the commercial heart of Dhaka.

There has been a “deliberate theft of the financial system” that has caused significant damage to banks and has serious consequences for the stock market and the economy in general, he said.

Bangladeshi banks are facing a flight of deposits and an alarming rise in problem assets due to defaults by groups allegedly linked to the ousted Awami League government.

The non-performing assets were “simply a robbery of the banks. They took the money and put it in Singapore, Dubai, London and elsewhere. So the first attempt would be to put people in their place and get the money back,” Dr Mansur told the BBC.

BBN/SSR/AD