DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) — The International Monetary Fund has demanded amendments to a draft rescue law aimed at hauling Lebanon out of its worst financial crisis on record and giving depositors access to savings frozen for six years, Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam said.

The “financial gap” law is part of a series of reform measures required by the IMF in order to access its funding and aims to allocate the losses from Lebanon’s 2019 crash between the state, the central bank, commercial banks and depositors.

Salam told Reuters the IMF wants clearer provisions in the hierarchy of claims, which is a core element of the draft legislation designed to determine how losses are allocated.

“We want to engage with the IMF. We want to improve. This is a draft law,” Salam said in an interview at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in the Swiss mountain resort of Davos.

“They wanted the hierarchy of claims to be clearer. The talks are all positive,” Salam added.

In 2022, the government put losses from the financial crisis at about $70 billion, a figure that analysts and economists forecast........

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