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Tariq briefs EU delegation about regional economic
cooperation
Staff Reporter
Islamabad—Mr. Tariq Sayeed, President, Mr. Iftikhar Ali Malik, Vice
President SAARC CCI along with Mr. Murtaza Hashwani, Chief Executive
of Hashoo Group and SCCI officials have met with a senor level
delegation from the European Union involving Mr. Peter Berz,
Counsellor, Head of Section -Political Economic & Trade Matters,
European Union, Mr. Tomas Niklasson, Counsellor/Head of Political,
Trade and Communication Section, Ms. Annette Grunberg, Pakistan Desk
Director General Trade and Mr. Husnain Iftakhar, Economist/Trade
Officer of the European Union, Delegation of the European Commission
to Pakistan, today in Islamabad.
Mr. Sayeed has briefed the delegation about the history of SCCI and
its activities and explained them about the SCCI’s main focused
areas involving Regional Economic Cooperation (Custom and Standards
Harmonization), SAFTA, Trade facilitation, Transport and
Infrastructure development, Tourism, Women Entrepreneurs and SMEs.
Mr. Sayeed appreciated the EU interest in promoting the regional
trade under SAFTA. He praised that the European Commission is
currently designing a new, broader programme of cooperation with
SAARC, which should notably seek to promote the harmonization of
standards; facilitate trade; raise awareness about the benefits of
regional cooperation; and promote business networking in the SAARC
area. We perceive that this program will provide an effective
roadmap for prompting intra-SAARC Trade as well as further
strengthen economic cooperation between SAARC and EU. He also
emphasized the importance Foreign Direct Investments in the region,
keeping in view of that now investments have overtaken as a basic
instrument to promote bilateral, regional and international trade.
He further said that SCCI has keen interest to get benefit of Europe
experiences on areas such as Free trade and Economic Union and SCCI
would like to focus on long term business partnership to improve
EU-SAARC.
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