According to Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili, the need to diversify and develop new routes was agreed on by Central Asian countries on Tuesday, and they paid a “special attention” to the transport corridor involving Georgia, highlighting the importance of port, railway and other infrastructure for realizing the country’s role of a regional hub.
As Garibashvili noted in his end-of-year summary of the Government’s work, they announced the search for a new investor for the construction of the Anaklia deep sea port on the Black Sea coast. The state will own 51 percent of its infrastructure. These are “urgent” plans for international investment and state participation in Anaklia deep-sea port revealed by Georgian PM.
The current limitations of the Poti and Batumi ports were also noted by him. According to the Prime Minister, Government did not have “any leverage to make certain regulations in relation to tariffs or anything else”.
He added that record-high revenues were attained by the railway. Record-high levels were shown by both the amount and volume of the transported freight. The modernization of the railways needs to be quickly completed.
They had completed 86 percent of the work of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway project. According to PM, they will officially launch the project in 2024, and passenger and good transport between Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey will be facilitated.
The task of transforming the country “not only into an energy and transport hub, but also into a digital hub which will connect Europe to Asia” was highlighted by Garibashvili as one of his team’s “main interests”. According to him, the Rothschild global advisory company’s work on the strategy for transforming Georgia into a regional financial hub had been completed.
As Garibashvili said, the implementation of this strategy and plan will already be started next year, and the results will be reported later.
The creation of a new information technology hub in the former Parliament building in the western Georgian city of Kutaisi with the aim to promote the development of the IT sector in the country was also mentioned by the PM.
Garibashvili said that the hub would attract and employ young people working in the field of IT. He added that this project would support Georgian students and young people in their development. The project would get “tens of millions of dollars” of investments.
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