BAKU, Azerbaijan, Feb. 9
Trend:
BP is our strategic partner, President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev said receiving Minister for European Neighbourhood and the Americas at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office Wendy Morton, Trend reports.
“You know BP is our strategic partner, the company which participated from the very beginning in the major projects in Azerbaijan as an investor. After the prolongation of the “Contract of the Century” our cooperation will continue for many more decades. Of course, with a new gas development in Azerbaijan and infrastructure which has been completed last December, the new opportunities we have now. We hope that there will be more discoveries from BP-operated fields. We have good prospects for that. So this is a very important part of our bilateral cooperation, also cooperation between other countries. We established a very probably the unique format of cooperation between the countries of our region and the European Union, and with the strong support from the governments of the United Kingdom and the United States. By the way, we will have the 7th meeting of the Advisory Council of the Southern Gas Corridor in two days’ time where we will review the achievements and look forward to future cooperation. And of course, investments from the UK to Azerbaijan helped us a lot to modernize the country. These investments were mainly in the energy sector, almost 30 billion dollars. But it allowed us to use properly the revenues from oil and gas sales to diversify the economy. Therefore I am sure that for the coming years our major area of concentration will be the non-energy sector development of Azerbaijan,” the head of state said.