The Lord Mayor of the City of London the Rt. Honourable Alderman Ian Luder discussed in Nicosia issues of further strengthening the commercial and economic ties between the UK and Cyprus, with emphasis on the help the UK can provide for large infrastructure projects, mainly in the public sector.
Speaking after a meeting on Tuesday of the Lord Mayor with President of the Republic of Cyprus Demetris Christofias, Minister of Finance Charilaos Stavrakis said the government is making efforts to bring more investments to Cyprus, adding that the visit of the Lord Mayor will help towards this end.
The Lord Mayor said he is in Cyprus ''with a business delegation'' and that ''we have just had a very productive and very friendly meeting with the President.''
He noted that President Christofias was in London last year and signed a Memorandum of Understanding between the two countries, ''reinforcing of course very long-term ties of friendship and of cooperation, and particularly cooperation of course in the EU context now.''
The Lord Mayor pointed out that ''we have had a number of very productive meetings'', including the Minister of Finance, ''because clearly finance is top of the agenda, it is very important, and we have been discussing areas for cooperation between our two countries, for our mutual benefit, in a number of areas.''
''I have invited the Minister to come and visit us in London later this year to take these things further,'' he added.
He also said that ''we really welcomed Cyprus' accession into the EU as another maritime nation.''
Asked which areas of cooperation were discussed, the Lord Mayor said ''areas in particular related to public-private partnership in respect to some of the very exciting large-scale infrastructure projects, which the government here is discussing, and of course at this particular time large-scale projects are counter-cyclical and are very good news and in the UK we have had just under 900 of these projects, which are an efficient and cost-effective way of delivering, in an innovative and modern way, public sector services, which range from hospitals to schools to roads to desalination plants.''
Stavrakis said ''we had an excellent meeting with the Mayor of the economic centre of London,'' adding that ''London is definitely the financial centre of the world right now.''
''We discussed issues of further strengthening commercial and economic ties between Great Britain and Cyprus. Special emphasis is given to the help Great Britain can offer to large infrastructure projects, mainly in the public sector, in which they can offer expertise and ideas and possibly bring us in contact with foreign investors,'' he said.
He added that ''it is acknowledged that we are living in a very difficult international financial environment,'' noting that ''the government is making every possible effort in many different sectors to bring more investments to Cyprus, and thus this visit of the Mayor of financial London will help in this direction.''
Replying to questions, Stavrakis said ''at this point a very intensive series of contacts is being held with the six parliamentary parties and the social partners,'' adding that their ideas would be placed in order and examined to see ''which respond to our policy to help the people through this crisis and, depending on the capacity of the public finances, we will take the measures that will have the most immediate results and will relieve us from this unprecedented global crisis.''
To other questions, Stavrakis said the President of the Republic may be ready to announce certain measures over the next few days.
