Central Bank of Oman issues treasury bills worth OMR17 million

Muscat: A tender of Government Treasury Bills, issue number 557, was held at the Central Bank of Oman (CBO) this week.
The total value of the allotted Treasury bills amounted to OMR17 million, for a maturity period of 364 days, from January 20, 2016 until January 18, 2017. The average accepted price reached 98.380 for every OMR100, the minimum accepted price arrived at 98.200 per OMR100 whereas the average discount rate and the average yield reached 1.62445 per cent and 1.65137 per cent respectively.
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.
Furthermore, Treasury Bills promote the local money market by creating a benchmark yield curve for short-term interest rates. Additionally, the Government (MOF) may also resort to this instrument whenever felt necessary for financing its recurrent expenditures.
The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is one per cent for the period from January 20 to January 26, 2016, while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 1.35 per cent, for the same period.