Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev on Thursday participated in World Economic Forum’s session together with Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, Commissioner for Budget and Administration, European Commission, Johannes Hahn, and Ebru Özdemir, Chairperson of the Board, Limak Holding.

In his address, Aliyev said “one of the advantages of the middle corridor is that the countries which are involved is this huge project have good relations between themselves. I think this is one of the main prerequisite for success in any multinational initiative.”

Aliyev also noted that “Azerbaijan has excellent relations with its neighbours to the West, Georgia and Turkey and to the East, Central Asia.”

“And being a kind of a natural geographical bridge between east and west, we invested largely into transportation infrastructure in the previous years and actually all the necessary infrastructure facilities in Azerbaijan are ready to receive more cargos. our support, which has a capacity of 15 million tons Will be expanded and already is a budget allocated for that up to 25 million tons, because we expect a growing number of cargos for particular reasons, which you mention, the difficulties of transportations through traditional northern route.

We already have seen the diversion of a large number of cargos from Central Asia, and this is on the beginning.  Also I’d like to add that starting from this year we started to transit oil from Kazakhstan and not only from Turkmenistan which already takes place for many years with the potential to use this corridor also for hydrocarbons,” he stated.

Azerbaijani President stressed the need to have “more closer cooperation between all the countries involved Central Asia and caucuses and Europe in order to work actively on customs administration, to have more or less a single window approach and on tariff policy, because we need to make this route not only attractive from point of view of absence of other route, but attractive from a commercial point of view.”