The US further pushed its campaign on Sunday to reduce borrowings from the International Monetary Fund by governments with access to private capital.

Larry Summers, the US Treasury secretary, said yesterday that making sure the IMF supported but did not supplant private capital markets was "vital to preserving the value of the institution and to maintaining broad-based support for it".

He told the IMF's International Monetary and Financial Committee in Prague that the fund's 24-strong board of directors should "undertake quarterly reviews of outstanding obligations with a focus on countries that have, or have regained, sufficient access to private markets".

Mr Summers is seeking financing from the Republican-led US Congress for a debt relief initiative for the world's poorest countries, but is under continuing pressure to secure further reforms from the IMF as a condition of that. One Republican concern has been that too many governments have been using the fund as a source of cheap funds.

Recent crisis borrowers from the fund have also been under US pressure to repay their loans as soon as possible. Mexico has repaid nearly all of the $14bn it borrowed during and since its 1994-95 financial crisis.

South Korea, which still owes the fund some $5.8bn of the $16bn it borrowed in 1997-98, is also under US pressure to repay its debt. Korean officials are considering announcing their intention to make such a move.

Meanwhile, Laurent Fabius, French finance minister, also said the IMF and other financial organisations had a role to play in encouraging countries to co-operate with international norms on money laundering and other financial abuses.

The committee's communique also suggested governments were moving towards consensus on the contentious issue of private sector involvement in resolving financial crises. The debate has been marked by a division between countries led by the US that have wanted to maintain maximum flexibility in a crisis and other governments, led by Germany, that have sought a strong set of rules, mainly to ensure that official money does not go to bail out private sector creditors in a crisis.

The emerging approach "strikes a balance between the clarity needed to guide market expectations and the operational flexibility, anchored in clear principles, needed to allow the most effective response in every case", the communique said.