- Friday, April 26, 2024
By: Shubham Ghosh
The government of Bangladesh has denied permission to Nora Fatehi, an actor from the Bollywood film industry in neighbouring India, to perform at an event in national capital Dhaka in order to save dollars as part of austerity measures.
According to a report by Bloomberg, the 30-year-old Canadian-born actor was not granted permission “in view of the global situation and with the aim of maintaining the foreign exchange reserves,” according to a notice that was issued by Bangladesh’s cultural affairs ministry on Monday (18).
Fatehi was scheduled to dance and hand out awards at an event organized by the Women Leadership Corporation.
The ministry referred to the central bank’s restrictions on dollar payments amid diminishing foreign exchange reserves, which slipped to $36.33 billion (32 billion) as of October 12 — enough to cover roughly four months of imports — from $46.13 billion (40.7 billion) only a year ago, the report added.
Fatehi made her debut in Hindi films in 2014, according to the IMDb website.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is about to send its first negotiation mission to Bangladesh later this month to open talks with the Sheikh Hasina government on loans the country has sought, according to Anne-Marie Gulde-Wolf, deputy director of the Asia and Pacific department at the IMF.
The reserves “are still at a comfortable level, but the direction has been going down,” she said at a media briefing last week.
The IMF is discussing an economic programme that will “contain measures to stabilize the economy and to avoid a further downturn in the economy,” the Bloomberg report added.
