Chairman of the Senate Dariga Nazarbayeva met the President of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development Suma Chakrabarti.
The meeting was attended by Senators Olga Perepechina and Serik Dzhaksybekov, Vice Minister of Finance Ruslan Beketayev, Vice President Risk and Compliance and Chief Risk Officer of the EBRD Annemarie Straathof, EBRD’s Managing Director for the Central Asia Andre Kuusvek, and Director of the EBRD Office in the RoK Agris Preimanis.
In her opening address D. Nazarbayeva noted that the EBRD is an important partner of our country, and also made a point of the active support provided to Kazakhstan by the bank for the economy modernization and implementation of welfare programs.
“Over the past 27 years the bank has invested more than $9 billion into 237 projects. This is a great achievement. And a lot of interesting projects in infrastructure development, healthcare, and green economy are still planned for the future”, - D. Nazarbayeva said.
The EBRD President stressed the importance of direct interaction of the bank representatives with the Parliaments of those countries where the bank has offices.
“For me it was very interesting and quite important to meet you today. I hope that Kazakhstan will also work to make our next 5-year strategy be focused on the Central Asia. We have much to do, and there are many transitory constrained points to be eliminated”, - S. Chakrabarti stated.
In addition, S. Chakrabarti emphasized the importance of development of a country initiative for Kazakhstan: “I think both the Government and the Parliament should be involved in generation of the ideas of financing projects in Kazakhstan”.
In the course of a conversation, D. Nazarbyeva told about the recent Parliamentary hearings on agri-culture development stating that a great number of gaps were revealed in terms of the sector administration and agricultural producer financing.
“We need an expert support. We decided to establish a special Council for agri-culture development. The relevant hearings will be hold throughout all the economy sectors to identify the gaps we have in terms of the legislative support and legal framework”, - the Head of the Senate said.
After the bilateral meeting, the EBRD President addressed the Senate deputies in the meeting room informing about the key projects implemented by the bank in Kazakhstan such as opening of the EBRD offices throughout Kazakhstan, attracting investment to the amount of $9.3 billion, and investing $3 million into renewable energy and women entrepreneurship related projects. Further, S. Chakrabarti touched on economic diversification, assistance and support of other sectors of economy, and the banking sector.
After the speech of the EBRD President there was an exchange of opinions on topical economic policy issues.
Deputy Sergey Plotnikov raised the topic of multi-billion investments made into the Kazakhstan economy through establishment of the Foreign Investors’ Council, and asked about prospects of enhancing cooperation with state agencies and measures to improve the business environment in Kazakhstan.
Senator Dauren Adilbekov touched upon evaluation of investments made, and asked about the EBRD’s recommendations on improvement of the Kazakhstan banking system.
Answering the question, S. Chakrabarti noted that the next EBRD’s 5-year strategy would promote the banking sector. “The banking sector should deliberately work within the areas with a greater economic return. Currently the EBRD focuses on crediting of small and medium-sized businesses”, - he said.
In his statement Senator Serik Dzhaksybekov suggested the EBRD to jointly create a raw materials processing project.
Summing up, Dariga Nazarbayeva stressed the importance of an expert opinion, and noted that over the years of its independence the state took great efforts to provide support to small and medium-sized businesses.
“Considerable finance have been allocated, a great deal of good laws has been adopted, but, nevertheless, today we still cannot say that all those measures resulted in an expansive growth of the sector and increased the number of people of the middle class. It appears that we have no system approach, there are only sketchy unconnected decisions aimed at scrambling to “put out” an aggravated problem. We only move from one such “fire” to another but we fail to address the problem of this sector in a consistent manner”, - she emphasized.
On behalf of deputies D. Nazarbayeva voiced support for the EBRD’s projects and expressed readiness to cooperate with the bank on development of small and medium-sized businesses.
