MUSCAT: A tender of Government Treasury Bills, issue number 548, worth OMR 54 million was announced this week.

Treasury Bills are short-term highly secured financial instruments issued by the Ministry of Finance, and they provide licensed commercial banks the opportunity to invest their surplus funds. The Central Bank of Oman (CBO) acts as the Issue Manager and provides the added advantage of ready liquidity through discounting and repurchase facilities (Repo).

The results of the said issue are as follows: the total value of the allotted Treasury bills amounted to OMR 54 million, for a maturity period of 91 days, from 20 October 2021 until 19 January 2022. The average accepted price reached 99.816 for every OMR 100, and the minimum accepted price arrived at 99.815 per OMR 100.

The average discount rate and the average yield reached 0.73943% and 0.74080%, respectively.

The interest rate on the Repo operations with CBO is 0.5% while the discount rate on the Treasury Bills Discounting Facility with CBO is 0.75%.

Furthermore, Treasury Bills promote the local money market by creating a benchmark yield curve for short-term interest rates. Additionally, the Government may also resort to this instrument whenever felt necessary for financing its recurrent expenditures.