State debt up to 1.14 trillion crowns

The Czech Republic’s state debt rose to around 1.14 trillion crowns, or more than 60 billion US dollars, by the end of June, according to official figures released on Wednesday. The debt rose by some 138 billion crowns since the beginning of the year. Broken down per head, each Czech citizen now owes 108,000 crowns. The Czech Finance Ministry said that the projected benchmarks of the financial programme were exceeded due to the world economic crisis that made the Czech government borrow more money. The average maturity of the debt dropped to 6.6 years by the end of June.