Moldova, Azerbaijan to set up joint ventures to process agri-food products

This decision was approved during a today's Moldovan-Azeri forum of business people, held in Baku within a two-day official visit to Azerbaijan by Premier Vasile Tarlev.

The Azeri business people showed interest in an offer to buy Moldovan wines and eventually make investments in Moldova's oil industry.

Participating in the forum, Prime Minister Vasile Tarlev has said Moldova will do its utmost so that the foreign investors feel in Moldova as well as in their own country. There are certain obstacles in the Moldovan fiscal policy, but they will be removed, the premier said.

Tarlev stressed that, in 2006, Moldova became a member country of the Central European Free Trade Agreement-2, and has already an asymmetric preferential trade regime with nine countries, and about 2,000 names of Moldovan goods have access to the European Union's market without customs duties.

At the same time, the premier said, to foster the Moldovan-Azeri relations, it is very important to open an Azeri trade house in Moldova and a Moldovan one in Azerbaijan, to inaugurate an air route and a bus route Chisinau-Baku, as well as to create optimum conditions for the collaboration between the two countries' business people.

Azeri Economic Development Minister Heydar Babayev welcomed the two states' intention to collaborate in the economic area, and said that there are many mutual advantages in this respect.

Referring to his country, Babayev said that ,in 2006 , Azerbaijan was a world leader as regards the increase in the Gross Domestic Product. He also said 25,000 new jobs were created in Azerbaijan, and the business climate improved.

At the forum, economic missions' representatives ruled to organise Azerbaijan's Days in Chisinau next October and Moldova's Days in Baku in 2008.

In 2006, the foreign trade between Moldova and Azerbaijan amounted to 6.6 million dollars, of which exports - 4.8 million dollars, - 1.3-fold more than in 2005.

/MOLDPRES/