BELGRADE: Serbia's central bank sold euros for the second day running on Thursday to halt the slide in the dinar, which has been weakening since December, when the IMF froze a standby arrangement with Belgrade due to its spending plans.
The bank sold 40 million euros and said in a short statement it had intervened to prevent "excessive daily oscillation of the exchange rate."
Earlier in the day a dealer with a commercial bank said the central bank was defending a line of 111 dinars to one euro.
It started selling euros around midday after the dinar fell to 111.33, the dealer said. After the intervention, the dinar settled at 111 to one euro.
On Wednesday, the bank sold 20 million euros ($26.4 million) to defend the dinar. The euro is the preferred foreign currency in Serbia.
So far in 2012, the bank has sold 365.5 million euros to prop up the dinar, which has fallen 3.65 percent. In all of 2011 it sold only 60 million euros. It also purchased 40 million euros last year to ease exchange rate volatility.
The dinar began sliding in December after the International Monetary Fund froze its 1 billion euro ($1.3 billion) standby deal with Serbia, citing higher-than-agreed 2012 spending plans that breached a self-imposed public debt limit of 45 percent of GDP.
The decision of US Steel to abandon a steel mill in Serbia, as well as political uncertainties over a May 6 parliamentary vote have also contributed to the dinar's decline.
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