Pakistani PM meets bigwigs of UK finance, opens bourse
Shehbaz Sharif on Tuesday became the first Pakistani prime minister to open the London Stock Exchange trading session and formally inaugurated the country’s landmark $3 billion dual-tranche sovereign Eurobond.
During his address at the LSE headquarters in Paternoster Square, the prime minister highlighted Pakistan’s immense potential to attract high-yield, safe and mutually beneficial foreign investment, said an official press release issued by the PM Office.
He said that in recent years, his government had worked very hard to strengthen Pakistan’s economy. “As I speak, we have strengthened our macroeconomic indicators, which are very promising and augur very well for the future,” he added.
The ceremony was attended by London Stock Exchange Group CEO David Schwimmer, Finance Minister Muhammad Aurangzeb, Adviser to the PM on Privatisation Mohammad Ali, Pakistan High Commissioner Tipu Usman, members of the Pakistani delegation and relevant British authorities.
The prime minister’s visit to the LSE underscored Pakistan’s return to global capital markets and reflected renewed international investor confidence in the country’s economic trajectory.
The prime minister further said that the latest contribution of the finance minister and his team in arranging the $3bn sovereign Eurobond spoke volumes about their hard work, deep-rooted structural changes, digitisation of the economy and taking all necessary measures to put the national economy back on track.
Referring to the Gulf crisis, he emphasised the need to learn new lessons as investors were now trying to evaluate and assess safer markets.
“Like other emerging economies, we are negotiating this challenge while also playing an important role as a peacemaker, mediating between the US and Iran. I hope that we will continue in this direction,” he added.
Meetings with financial institutions
Later, PM Shehbaz met senior executives from leading global financial institutions in London and invited them to invest and expand their services in Pakistan.
In a statement, the PM Office said the premier’s engagements with the executives of global firms — Barclays, JP Morgan, Citi, BlackRock and Rothschild & Co — “underscored growing international financial sector interest in Pakistan’s economic reform trajectory and improving investment climate”.
In his meeting with a high-level JP Morgan delegation led by its co-CEO for Europe, Middle East and Africa Matthieu Wiltz, PM Shehbaz invited the firm to expand its footprint in Pakistan. He discussed deepening the partnership across capital markets, trade finance and investment banking.
The JP Morgan delegation “reaffirmed its interest in sovereign debt capital markets and corporate banking opportunities”.
He also met a group of senior Citi officials, led by David Livingstone, chief client officer. PM Shehbaz commended the bank’s long-standing presence in Pakistan and encouraged an expansion of its corporate and institutional banking services in the country.
In a meeting with a BlackRock delegation comprising Gordon Fraser and Sam Vecht, co-heads of Emerging Markets and Frontiers, and Emily Fletcher, portfolio manager and research analyst, the PM invited increased allocations to Pakistani equities and fixed income within the firm’s frontier markets strategy, with both sides emphasising the importance of sustained policy consistency in building investor confidence.
Reference Link:- https://www.dawn.com/news/2033665
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
