Azerbaijan, Baku, 27 February / corr Trend S.Agayeva / Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, visited Gdansk port on 27 February to get familiar with oil refinery plant in Gdansk intended to receive Azerbaijani crude.
Gdansk, a big port in the Baltic Sea, is a center of industry, particularly petro-chemistry and machine building. Gdransk is the final point for delivery of Caspian hydrocarbons via the Odessa-Brody-Plotzk-Gdansk. The polish party familiarized the Azerbaijani President about the potential of the city and capacity of the oil refinery plant of LOTOS company.
The production capacity of the plant comprising 6mln tons a year will be increased to 10mln tons after the reconstruction. The plant refines Russian oil delivered via the Druzhba pipeline. Following the exploitation of the Odessa-Brody-Gdansk oil pipeline by 2010, the Caspian oil will be refined here. An international pipeline union Sarmatiya with the participation of the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan (SOCAR) was established last year to implement this project.
A political decision on the establishment of the company which will be involved in development of a feasibility study of the Baku-Tbilisi-Odessa-Brodi-Plotzk-Gdansk oil route, was made at the Vilnius energy summit of the heads of state of Azerbaijan, Georgia, Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania in October 2007
The Azerbaijani President paid a two-day visit to Poland on 27 February. During his one-to-one meeting with Polish President Lech Kachinskiy the Azerbaijani leader discussed further development of bilateral relations, as well as prospects of cooperation between Poland and GUAM. Later talks continued in large with the participation of government officials from the two countries. As a result of talks the two Presidents signed a memorandum on cooperation, as well as two agreements envisioning the development of relations in different spheres of economy.