BlackRock and Standard Chartered will participate in a debt roundtable on Friday

By Andrea Shalal and Jorgelina do Rosario

WASHINGTON/LONDON, Feb 17 (Reuters) – U.S. investment firm BlackRock said on Friday it would participate in a new roundtable on sovereign debt, set up to accelerate progress on stalled relief efforts for distressed countries, in which The British Standard Chartered will also participate. join, according to the sources consulted.

The Global Roundtable on Sovereign Debt, chaired by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and India, this year’s leader of the Group of 20 largest economies, will hold its first virtual meeting on Friday, to establish order of the day of a face-to-face meeting which will take place on February 25, on the sidelines of the meeting of the financial leaders of the G20 in the Indian city of Bangalore.

“We welcome the Global Sovereign Debt Roundtable and look forward to constructively engaging in dialogue alongside other key stakeholders,” a BlackRock spokesperson told Reuters.

Three people with knowledge of the matter said Standard Chartered would also attend the meeting. A Standard Chartered spokesman did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Unlike the G-20 Common Framework platform for debt treatment, the roundtables include public and private creditors, as well as borrowing countries, with the aim of finding common ground on standards, the principles and definitions on how to restructure the debt of countries in difficulty, according to various authorities.

Participants include representatives from creditor countries: China, India, Saudi Arabia, the United States and other wealthy G7 democracies; as well as six borrowing countries: Ethiopia, Zambia, Ghana, Sri Lanka, Suriname and Ecuador.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal in Washington and Jorgelina do Rosario in London, editing by Karin Strohecker and Tomasz Janowski; editing in Spanish by Darío Fernández)