Qatar plans to float 4 billion riyals ($1.1 billion) of treasury bills next week as its central bank seeks to set a benchmark for debt sales, the Bloomberg newspaper said on Thursdy. “The objective of this is to manage liquidity and also to build our sovereign yield curve,” Central Bank Governor Abdullah Bin Saud Al-Thani told Bloomberg in a telephone interview Thursday. The three-month T-bills will be sold on Aug. 8 and will be split equally between Islamic and non-Islamic securities, the newspaper quoted Al-Thani as saying. Qatar has issued 10 billion riyals of T-bills of different maturities on a monthly basis this year, the governor said. The Aug. 8 issuance will be the fourth. Qatar, the world's largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, has supported its banks through the global financial crisis with cash injections and the purchase of real-estate portfolios. The central bank lowered interest rates in April after credit growth slowed and also sold 50 billion riyals of bonds to local banks in January. Banks' loans-to-deposit ratio in Qatar fell to 90 percent at the end of June from 96 percent in December as the lenders added a combined 47 billion riyals in deposits, according to data posted on the central bank website.
