Azerbaijan, Baku, June 20 /Trend A. Badalova/
Today the 268-th Session of the IDB Board of Executive Directors has began its work under the chairmanship of the IDB President Ahmad Mohamed Ali in Baku.
At the opening meeting the IDB President raised questions about the bank's close cooperation with Azerbaijan.
The agenda included issues such as strategic partnership between the new IDB member-countries, and in particular, the cooperation agreement recently signed with Turkey. Strategic Partnership of member-countries is a mechanism to involve each member-country to create a partnership strategy, focusing on development priorities of the participating countries. Moreover, the session's agenda includes discussion of issues such as progress in implementing the reform program of the IDB Group, the implementation of the Jeddah Declaration, adopted in 2008, on the results of the 33-rd annual meeting of the IDB Board of Governors held in Jeddah.
The organizing of the 35-th Annual Meeting of IDB Board of Governors, to be held June 23-24 with the participation of ministers of finance, economics and planning of the 56 member countries of the bank was discussed at the session.
Moreover, a number of administrative and technical issues, approval of new projects in several member-countries, as well as grants and support to Muslim communities in the countries-non-members of the bank were discussed at the session.
The meetings of the Islamic Corporation for Private Sector Development (ICD), International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation (ITFC) and the Islamic Solidarity Fund for Development were also held as part of the annual meeting.
Portfolio of the bank in Azerbaijan reached $ 300 million.
The Islamic Development Bank was established in 1975. Since the day of its founding, the authorized capital of the bank increased 15 times from 2 billion Islamic Dinars (Islamic Dinar is a unit of IDB account. It is equivalent to one Special Drawing Right of the International Monetary Fund) up to 30 billion Islamic dinars.
As of late 2009 the total amount of funding approved by the IDB for its member-countries, including trade financing, amounted to about $7.254 billion on 457 transactions. The IDB portfolio increased by 29 percent compared to 2008. From the day of its establishment, the bank has financed projects worth $64 billion.