Commerce minister to discuss FTA in Iran visit

ISLAMABAD: Minister of commerce Khurram Dastgir will visit Iran from December 28-29 to discuss the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and resumption of banking channels between the two countries.

In an exclusive interview with Radio Tehran, the minister said he hopes that the FTA would be signed by the end of 2017. The visit to Iran was a followup on the valuable visit by Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani to Pakistan earlier this year.

“We are very much looking forward to progress on the five year economic engagement plan that was signed during that visit,” he said. Dastgir said there already has been good progress on one part of the plan, as the offer by Pakistan to sign a Free Trade Agreement has been accepted by Iran.

“We have already exchanged drafts of the agreement,” he added. The minister said that Iran and Pakistan have already held their first negotiations on FTA, and both were positive to conclude it ideally by the end of 2017.

He said that during his visit, he would also be discussing the prospects of broader energy ties with Iran, particularly in reference to the electricity that Pakistan is buying from Tehran for the port of Gwadar.

He said the current status of Iran-Pakistan (IP) gaspipeline would also be on the agenda of his upcoming visit toTehran. \He also reiterated that Iran and Pakistan were very near to resolving the banking problem between the two countries. The minister noted that there was already a lot of trade that both sides were not capturing in statistics, “so by bringing down tariffs we want to encourage people to do formal trade”.