Tokyo, 17 November, /AJMEDIA/
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is currently working to expand the number of banks in Azerbaijan with which the EBRD cooperates, Head of EBRD Small Business Investment Committee Andrew McDonald said, AJMEDIA reports.
He spoke at the World Forum on Small and Medium Enterprises held in Baku.
“Banks are very important for us to reach out to the local economy because they give us many more partners and then we can reach out to more companies, which provides a greater scale of impact. So leveraging those relationships and increasing the amount of work we do in the advisory business will complement it, and allow companies to see the benefits of it,” he said.
The EBRD has been cooperating with Azerbaijan since 1992 and is the country’s leading investor.
The former head of the EBRD representative office in Azerbaijan, Kamola Makhmudova, said earlier that the expected portfolio of investment projects for the next three years is $750 million. The EBRD plans to invest about $300 million in 2023 in a number of industries, such as energy, transport, the private sector, SMEs and the banking sector.