The first-ever EU-Angola Business forum took place this Thursday in Brussels with an objective of convincing European investors to bet on Angola’s reforms to support private sector investment and business links.
Francisco Franca, the CEO of Angola’s Mota -Engil said, “Angola, today, is a country that is open to international investors, something that was not a few years ago, and so today there are many opportunities in Angola , let’s say, to execute projects. And, the government itself has established a series of rules that are in the legislation and that allow international investors to go to Angola and invest in Angola.”
The hybrid event that attracted more than 800 participants, saw the signing of a memorandum with the Dutch consortium Flying Swans in order to develop a cold logistics chain, a vector that can attract foreign direct investment in Angola.
Reacting to the openness and the efforts that the Government in Luanda has done, the Minister of State Manuel Nunes Junior for Economic Coordination said, “There is a very big change here in the functioning of the foreign exchange market, those people who invest in Angola and who at the end of the year want to transfer their dividends out of the country, today they can do it with all the predictability, with all the transparency unlike what happened until 2017.”
Angola was successful in bagging a 50, 000, 000 euro loan from the European Investment Bank and a 7,000,000 euro grant from the European Union to support health resilience were also signed in Brussels. But the partnership between Angola and the European Union is not only about money.
The EU Ambassador to Angola, Jeannette Seppen expressed her views regarding the forthcoming elections saying, “The elections of course will be a very important moment for Angola. The European Union is willing and is ready to deploy an election observation mission, we have shared that with the government of Angola, we haven’t received an invitation as yet to deploy an observation mission, and we will wait, time is running a bit short because deploying such a mission takes a lot of preparation, but we haven’t received the invitation as yet.”
