Jakarta – Indonesia's central bank (BI) and the UN Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET) on Friday agreed to repatriate the equivalent of around 20 million dollars of Indonesian rupiah now circulating in East Timor.

"An agreement was reached by BI and UNTAET to repatriate the rupiah currency from East Timor," BI deputy governor Miranda Gultom said in a press briefing at the bank's headquarters here.

The move came as UNTAET is struggling to halt the use of the rupiah and the Australian dollar in the territory, and enforce the use of the US dollar as legal tender.

Gultom, the signatory of the memorandum of understanding with UNTAET's liaison office director, Lakhan Mehrotra, said there were eight Indonesian commercial banks in Dili before East Timor gained its independence on September 4, 1999.

The director of UNTAET's Central Payment Office (CPO) in Dili, Fernando Peralto, said it was difficult to know the precise quantity of Indonesian rupiah in circulation in East Timor. But "we estimated that the amount is in the order of some 20 million dollars," Peralto told a press briefing.

Gultom said the figure came from a discrepancy in BI's cash inflow of 300 billion rupiah (26.84 million dollars) and 548 billion (49.03 million dollars) cash outflow in Dili by the end of 1999.

Under the memorandum, both BI and UNTAET would spend six months working out the discrepancies and trying to calculate the amount of rupiah circulating in the East Timorese capital of Dili.

It also stipulates that in the next six months, the CPO can only repatriate the rupiah through BI's branch in Denpasar, the capital of the neighboring island of Bali, up to twice a month.

Peralto said the the memorandum also allows UNTAET to "enter cooperation with [BI-appointed] commercial banks and for them to take rupiahs deposited by their [former] customers." The CPO will also provide public facilities for East Timorese to exchange their rupiah into US dollars.

It will be "pretty easy to have most of the rupiah in circulation brought into the banks and into the CPO within the next six months" with BI's restriction on the imports of rupiah, Peralto said. He added that UNTAET had recently brought 500,000 dollars worth of US coins into the territory.