An International Monetary Fund review mission is expected in Pakistan next month to conduct the fourth review of the country’s $7 billion Extended Fund Facility, with the government’s Sovereign Wealth Fund legislation high on the agenda (Geo News).
A senior official in the Finance Division told The News the mission is expected in September 2026, but that exact dates have not been confirmed. The IMF has announced no mission dates of its own. It has, however, set the same expectation in writing: its May staff report states that “completion of the fourth review scheduled for September 2026” will require observance of the end-June 2026 performance criteria, and its disbursement schedule puts the fourth EFF purchase date at 15 September 2026 (IMF Country Report No. 26/101). A staff statement on 20 May said the next mission — which is to combine the Article IV consultation with the EFF and RSF reviews — was expected in the second half of 2026 (IMF). Dunya News reported the September expectation in July (Dunya News).
What has been paid out so far
The EFF is a 37-month arrangement approved in September 2024, running into late 2027. It sits alongside a separate $1.4 billion Resilience and Sustainability Facility.
The IMF Executive Board completed the third EFF review in May, releasing about $1.1 billion under the EFF and about $220 million under the RSF — a combined $1.32 billion (Arab News).
That brought total disbursements under the two arrangements together to about $4.8 billion — the IMF’s own wording. It is worth being precise about that figure: it is not $4.8bn drawn from the $7bn EFF. Measured against the combined $8.4bn envelope of both facilities, roughly $3.6 billion remains undrawn — arithmetic on the headline dollar figures, and the same number Dunya News and others reported in July (Dunya News). Both arrangements are denominated in SDRs, so the dollar value of what is left will move with the exchange rate.
The size of the tranche a fourth review would unlock has not been announced by either the IMF or the Finance Division. The published schedule sets every EFF purchase at the same SDR 760 million — roughly $1 billion to $1.1 billion at recent rates. The $1.2 billion widely reported in December 2025 was the EFF and RSF tranches counted together, not an EFF disbursement.
The conditions in play
The government has tabled the Pakistan Sovereign Wealth Fund (Amendment) Bill, 2026 in the Senate, recasting the fund as a holding company for state-owned enterprises rather than one that can execute asset sales directly; any disposal would instead go through open, competitive procedures (Profit, citing The Express Tribune, Business Recorder).
Under commitments given to the Fund, the SWF will be barred from incurring debt, issuing guarantees, lending, or joining public-private partnerships, and all its revenues must flow straight to the federal government. The amendments are to be written into law as a structural benchmark after the FY2026-27 budget is approved (Profit, citing The Express Tribune).
Six amendments to SOE-specific laws went to parliament in January 2026. The structural benchmark covers nine statutory SOEs in all, and the remaining three must be brought into line by end-August 2026 — a deadline that falls on Monday (IMF Country Report No. 26/101).
The mission will also take up the Governance and Anti-Corruption Diagnostic. The Prime Minister’s Economic Governance Reform plan, published as a benchmark in its own right, sets out 15 reform actions with performance indicators and timelines. Separate benchmarks require online publication of senior federal civil servants’ asset declarations by end-December 2026 and NAB Ordinance amendments — covering the chairman’s appointment process and publication of investigation and prosecution rules — by end-January 2027 (same staff report; see also Dawn).
Friction points
One directly relevant condition has already been missed. Parliament was to adopt the SWF Law amendments by end-March 2026; the IMF’s staff report records that structural benchmark as “not met,” and the bill is still before the Senate (IMF Country Report No. 26/101).
The Fund is also resisting one government instinct: it is seeking to curtail the federal government’s power to push gas tariffs down, warning that cuts would swell circular debt (The Express Tribune). Gas-sector circular debt stood at Rs3,288 billion as of 30 June 2025, including Rs1,468 billion of interest.
The review lands weeks after Moody’s raised Pakistan to B3 from Caa1 on 24 August. Moody’s said continued implementation of the IMF-supported programme “has strengthened policy credibility, maintained macroeconomic stabilisation and underpinned financing from official creditors” (Dawn) — the agency’s reserve forecasts of $19-20bn by end-FY27 are explicitly conditional on the programme staying on track.
Whether the SOE deadline is met on Monday, and whether the SWF bill clears the Senate before the mission arrives, will shape what the IMF team finds.
