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Customs service heads of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia to meet in Baku

3 April 2017 11:42 (UTC+04:00)
Customs service heads of Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia to meet in Baku

By Amina Nazarli

The meeting of the heads of the customs services of Azerbaijan, Turkey and Georgia will be held in Baku in May, Shahin Bagirov said at the trilateral technical meeting on customs issues of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars project.

Deputy Chairman of the State Customs Committee of Azerbaijan revealed that the meeting will determine activity forms of the customs bodies after the launch of the railway corridor.

“The construction of the BTK railway will be completed in a short time. Most of the work has already been completed. There have been insignificant works on the territory of Georgia and Turkey, which will be completed in the coming months. In early May, a meeting of heads of customs bodies will take place in Baku, where the forms of activity of customs bodies will be determined after the beginning of the functioning of the railway corridor and a corresponding memorandum will be signed,” Bagirov said.

The BTK railway is being constructed on the basis of the Azerbaijan-Georgia-Turkey intergovernmental agreement. Peak capacity of the railway will be 17 million tons of cargo per year. At the initial stage, it will serve one million passengers and transport 6.5 million tons of cargo.

BTK project is expected to further strengthen the neighborly and fraternal relations among the three countries and enable the countries to supply domestically produced goods to the world markets.

Earlier, Turkey’s Minister of Transport, Maritime and Communication Ahmet Arslan said that cargo will be transported from China to Europe in 12-15 days via BTK.

The State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ) invested some $630.2 million in the construction of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project as of January 1, 2017. Last year, the fund allocated $41.9 million for the implementation of the project.

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Amina Nazarli is AzerNews’ staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @amina_nazarli

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAz

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