Baku, Azerbaijan, Nov. 18
Trend:
All the accumulation of money from oil sales of Azerbaijan and also spending are transparent and internationally audited, said Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev during a meeting with a group of participants of the 5th News Agencies World Congress in Baku.
“Oil, of course, is a big asset. But it depends on how you take advantage of this asset,” said President Aliyev. “We see the examples of many oil producing countries, which do not benefit from oil, and actually development of oil was a curse for them.”
“When we started new projects with international oil companies our main objective was to provide maximum transparency in accumulation and spending of our financial reserves,” he noted. “For that purpose we created a state oil fund, which is considered to be one of the most transparent sovereign wealth funds in the world.”
“We can spend money from the oil fund only through budget spending, which is approved by the parliament. That is why we managed to create very substantial financial reserves in Azerbaijan, which are now very close to our GDP,” said the president. “The state oil fund and our policy of transparency played a crucial role in this respect.”
President Aliyev went on to add that Azerbaijan invested a lot of money from oil sales in infrastructure.
“We completely renovated infrastructure in the regions – highways, power generation, gas supply, sanitation, water supply,” he said. “Today we export not only oil and gas, but also electricity, which we used to buy many years ago.”