President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele rummaged through older international news agencies for their reports on the country’s debt situation.

What happened: Bukele said old international news outlets had wrongly blamed El Salvador’s debt situation on their own Bitcoin BTC/USD Bet.

He said even though many outlets were reporting that El Salvador was at risk of defaulting on its 2023 bond issue without reaching an agreement with the IMFMe, the country had paid off its $800 million debt “in full…plus interest.”

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“They lie and lie and lie and when their lies are exposed they go into silent mode,” he said.

The press office of the El Salvador Presidency told Reuters that the payment, which followed an earlier transaction, included $604.1 million and $23.4 million in interest. “El Salvador is meeting its debt obligations,” it said.

According to a report by Bloomberg, Optimism that El Salvador can avoid a default is evident in the numbers: Its dollar debt has risen an average of 23% so far this year, the best performance of any emerging market country tracked by a major Bloomberg index. This month, El Salvador secured a $450 million loan from the Central American Bank for Economic Integration that will help position El Salvador to meet future bond maturities through 2025.

Meanwhile, the El Salvador Legislative Assembly on January 11th unanimously passed a law regulating it the issuance of digital assets, opening up the possibility of issuing government-backed bitcoin bonds.

Price promotion: BTC traded at $23,083 over the past 24 hours, up 1.45%, according to Benzinga Pro.

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