Private Sector on tour

Ramping up investments in Uzbekistan and marking AIIB’s first decade

Vice President Alnassar participates in Central Asian business forum

Tareq Alnassar, Vice President, Private Sector, participated in the Tashkent International Investment Forum, Uzbekistan in June. There he met global investors, government officials, business leaders and representatives from international organizations to discuss and explore investment opportunities in Uzbekistan and the Central Asian region.

On the sidelines of the event Vice President Alnassar signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Laziz Kudratov, Minister of Investment, Industry and Trade, aiming to increase the mobilization of funds and private sector participation in development financing.

To date, the OPEC Fund has approved more than US$725 million in loans to Uzbekistan, mainly in the financial and energy sectors. The latter includes €35 million for the award-winning Surkhandarya power plant, which will serve 500,000 households in the southeast of the country.

AIIB, the “New MDB Kid on the Block”, is already an essential partner

To celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), an OPEC Fund delegation led by Vice President, Private Sector Tareq Alnassar and joined by Director, Business Development Khalid Khadduri, Director, Sector and Themes Somnath Basu and Investment Manager Abdulaziz AlMunaye attended AIIB’s Annual Meeting in Beijing, in June.

The mission included fruitful meetings with senior AIIB stakeholders, including Chief Investment Officers Konstantin Limitovskiy and Rajat Misra and their teams, as well as the VPs of Investment Solutions and Policy & Strategy. Discussions focused on reinforcing our strong partnership, with several promising areas identified to deepen collaboration across private sector operations. The delegation also participated and spoke in a roundtable organized by AIIB on “Unleashing Collaboration – Forging Strategic Partnerships for Impact and Scale alongside other MDBs and AIIB partners.”

AIIB is a key partner of the OPEC Fund. In May President Jin Liqun visited the OPEC Fund leadership in Vienna. That meeting built on a Memorandum of Understanding, signed in 2022, which aims to identify co-financing and co-investment opportunities for projects and programs, share best practices and intensify contacts and exchanges. On the ground, recent co-financing has included two major operations in India, the Chennai Peripheral Ring Road and the Mumbai Metro Line 5 and an energy project in Bangladesh.