Azernews.Az

By Aisha Jabbarova

President Ilham Aliyev has praised Azerbaijan’s ties with the UK, saying that cooperation with the country’s BP company will continue for at least 30 years to come.

Aliyev made the remarks while receiving UK Minister for Exports Graham Stuart on May 21.

Stressing that the UK has invested over 30bn dollars in Azerbaijan so far, Aliyev said that this investment has helped not only the country’s oil and gas sector but its overall development as well.

“These investments led to additional revenues to our budget which we reinvested in non-oil and gas related areas.”

Commenting on the British Petroleum (BP) company that has been developing Azerbaijan’s oil and gas reserves since the early 1990s, Aliyev stressed that BP will remain Azerbaijan’s strategic partner "for at least 30 more years” because there are new prospects and new agreements signed.

Cooperation in renewables

The president said that both BP and Azerbaijan are very actively working on renewable sources of energy, including in the country’s recently-liberated territories.

“There is a plan to invest in solar power generation on the liberated areas which will be very helpful to us, especially with respect to the fact that we announced liberated territories of Karabakh as a territory of green energy and smart city. At the same time, I would like to say that we already invited British companies as our partners, among the first foreign companies to work with us on the restoration, reconstruction of the liberated territories and this process already started. Cities’ master plans have already been prepared and we are in a very active phase. We want to expand cooperation with British companies, as companies from a friendly country,” Aliyev said.

The president noted that despite pandemic, relations between the two countries have been in a very active phase.

He reminded his visit to the UK three years ago as well as UK Minister Wendy Morton’s visit to Azerbaijan back in February, saying that this shows that there is active political dialogue and great prospects in economic sphere between the two countries.

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