Use Exchange Fund For Covid Relief: Michael Tien

Roundtable lawmaker Michael Tien on Saturday urged the government to draw on the massive reserves of the Exchange Fund to help people and businesses hit by the pandemic.

The legislator said many businesses are suffering and also called on the authorities to provide some kind of tax incentives to landlords or developers when they agree to cut rents for retailers.

He said the government should discuss this with major developers and malls owners and appeal to them to trim rents, saying it would help local retailers to survive.

Tien added that the Exchange Fund, which is used to defend the Hong Kong-US dollar peg, has been growing over the years and it's time to use it for another purpose.

"We have a huge amount of Exchange Fund reserves, which the government has never explained why they need to keep building up this Exchange Fund," Tien said.

"And do we need an ever-increasing amount of Exchange Fund to defend our peg? Why can't some of that be used to help relieve our economy in this once-every-century pandemic?"

Officials have warned that despite a fall in the number of local cases, the fourth wave is still a major concern.

Writing on her blog, the Health Secretary, Sophia Chan, said that although she's seen a drop in local cases recently, the latest wave of infections is declining far more slowly than was seen in the third wave of infections in autumn 2020.

And since mid-November, she added that the government has found more than 3,000 coronavirus patients through temporary testing centres, its testing programmes for targeted groups and the specimen collection services provided by health authorities.