PM Victor Ponta Makes Tour of the Gulf Region
PM Victor Pontas one-week tour of the Gulf region, a tour with a high economic stake, has just ended.
Bogdan Matei, 06.05.2015, 13:10
No one can ever ignore the potential of the Gulf countries, which are believed to be swimming in a sea of petrol and dollars. No wonder that the Arab countries’ financial capital is an attraction for all governments of the world. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates were the stages of the Romanian Prime Minister Victor Ponta’s tour of the region, and at every stop, he tried to convince his hosts that Romania is a country worth doing business with.
In Riyadh, where he was welcomed by King Salman, PM Ponta admitted that Romania needs partners like Saudi Arabia, able to invest in agriculture, constructions, health tourism and defense industry. No later than next month a group of Romanian business people will go to Saudi Arabia with concrete partnership proposals.
Twenty-five years since the setting up of diplomatic ties between Romania and Qatar, Victor Ponta was the first Romanian PM to pay an official visit to Doha, where he clearly stated that he wanted to re-launch the bilateral political dialogue and improve economic ties. The volume of bilateral trade is on an upward trend, yet its level, of only 61 million dollars, does not mirror the full potential for collaboration with a country that earmarks hundreds of billions of dollars for investment abroad.
In Kuwait, the Romanian official discussed about projects in sectors like agriculture, health, IT and energy infrastructure. The two sides have been looking for ways to make the access of Romanian products to the Kuwaiti and Gulf markets quicker and easier. According to Ponta, “Romania is appreciated and loved in Kuwait, given the role it played in 1990,” when Bucharest firmly condemned the Iraqi invasion in the country.
In Abu Dhabi, the talks with country officials and representatives of the business community focused on the Romanian Government’s plan to list the Otopeni Airport in Bucharest, the biggest in the country, and to restructure the state-owned airline, TAROM.
PM Victor Ponta: “We have succeeded, from a political viewpoint, to prove once more that we are interested in a relationship with them. They have been open to the idea from the very beginning. We have discussed about very concrete things. Now it’s up to us to keep our word, because we have the bad habit of agreeing on projects which later, because of the bureaucracy or for fear of putting our signature on documents, fail to materialize. I will personally see that the ministers who have accompanied me on this tour will start working on some of the projects we have discussed.”
In the communist period Bucharest did not have diplomatic ties with the monarchies in the Gulf region, but it used to have close ties with the secular dictatorships in Algeria, Libya, Syria and Iraq. Without nostalgia and in a pragmatic manner, political and economic analysts see Ponta’s bet on making the Arab world an important partner for Romania again, a very bold move.
