"The foreign exchange reserve reached the ever-highest level mainly due to significant inflow of remittances and disbursement of soft loans by multilateral donor agencies," a senior central bank official was quoted by English daily The Financial Express assaying.

The reserve went up as the World Bank recently released 315 million U.S. dollars and the Asian Development Bank 32 million U.S. dollars as soft loans, the Bangladesh Bank official said.

Besides, the country received around 50 million U.S. dollars recently from the United Nations for participating in the peacekeeping missions.

Bangladesh received 7.163 billion U.S. dollars in remittance during the period of July-May of the fiscal 2007-08 ending on June30, marking a 31.14 percent growth over the corresponding period in last fiscal, according to the central bank statistics. (Xinhua)