S. DIMAS: His Highness the Foreign Minister, Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, and I had an excellent meeting and discussion. We discussed bilateral and regional issues within the framework of our meeting and the convening of the first Greek-United Arab Emirates Joint Cooperation Committee, with which we are starting this major effort to further develop not only political relations – which are at an excellent level – but also our economic relations, which are developing and have a lot of room for further growth.
I would like to thank His Highness for his personal efforts to make this meeting succeed and for the participation of many important UAE companies and investors. We have a great friend of Greece, and we assure him that our country will be a longstanding friend, ally and partner of the Unite Arab Emirates. Again, I welcome him and the investors and businesspersons from the UAE, and I wish them every success.
AL NAHYAN: I thank the worthy Minister and I want to say how happy I am to be in this friendly country. As Mr. Dimas said, our relations are excellent, but we want to develop these relations further. I am very happy with the participation of the private sector from both countries, from Greece and the UAE. I am not talking about the number of participants, but about the quality of the people participating in this meeting. I think there is clear interest from representatives of the UAE private sector who are here in Greece to discuss investment opportunities in this country.
Mr. Minister, I want to thank you for this opportunity to be here and for your efforts to hold this meeting and, moreover, for the excellent environment for the participation of businesspersons and investors from the Emirates. Thank you very much.
January 11, 2012