TRIBUNE NEWS NETWORK

DOHA QATAR will invest €100 million in Bulgaria’s agriculture, tourism and infrastructure sectors, Prime Minister and Foreign Minister HE Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor al Thani said on Wednesday.

Addressing a meeting of Qatari and Bulgarian businessmen, he said that a Qatari team including experts in the three sectors will visit Bulgaria within a month to discuss cooperation in these sectors, ahead of his (PM’s) visit to Bulgaria.

Energy sector experts will also be on the visiting team.

“In the current circumstances, we have to be cautious and be sure of what we are doing”, he added.

Qatar has proposed that Bulgaria stage an exhibition for Bulgarian products in Qatar, he said, pointing out that his talks with Boyko Borisov centred on ways of stepping up economic, political and social relations between the two countries.

He noted that Borisov showed eagerness to promote bilateral cooperation to step up bilateral corporate investments and noted that Bulgarian companies have a chance to compete in Qatar’s transparent private and public sectors.

Bulgarian and Qatari officials have started working on a framework agreement that is meant to create opportunities for Qatari investments to enter Bulgaria, according to Bulgarian Foreign Minister Nikolay Mladenov.

The investment framework agreement has been proposed by HE the Qatari PM, as he wants to fix the framework of Qatar’s initial investments in Bulgaria, Mladenov said.

An investment agreement is expected to be first created in the fields of tourism, agriculture and infrastructure, he revealed.

Mladenov stated that he expected a framework agreement between the two countries to be signed by May 2012.

Meanwhile, Qatar will make bigger budgetary provisions this year for the infrastructure sector than last year, the prime minister said.

Construction, roads and the underground metro project are some of the areas which will get higher allocation. He also said that the government would delay the budget for two or three months to reorganise priorities.