Wednesday 27 September 2023 - 4:18:26 pm
Sat 12-10-2019 22:44 PM
By Binsal Abdulkader MOSCOW, 13th October 2019 (WAM) – The UAE’s investments in Russia during its one of the difficult times heavily helped the Russian economy, which strengthened the strategic relations between both countries, according to a top Russian official.
"One of the ways to illustrate the great strategic partnership between Russian and the UAE is investments. We have got very good partnership with Mubadala [Abu Dhabi-based global investment company], which invested during the past four years in 45 businesses in Russia that are critical to the growth of Russian economy," said Kirill Dmitriev, CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, RDIF, Russia’s sovereign wealth fund.
"We saw Mubadala investing four years ago, [during] one of the difficult times of Russian economy, and then they got very good returns because Russian economy [later] recovered and returned to normal," he told a UAE media delegation that visited his office in Moscow, ahead of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s visit to the UAE on October 15.
He said Russian President’s visit would further strengthen the economic relationship, which would benefit both peoples by creating more jobs , more trade and cultural exchanges."
Dmitriev said he wanted to thank the strategic nature of this relationship between RDIF and Mubadala, which established a US$2 billion joint platform for investments.
"We jointly invested in helicopters of Russia. Mubadala invested in one of the largest petrochemical projects in Russia, which helped create 20,000 (twenty thousand) jobs in Russia’s regions in the north.
"We built from scratches the largest logistical company called PLT. All these have been grown by our [joint] investments during the past four years," the CEO explained.
Russia has a national plan to invest US$100 for infrastructure development and this will open new opportunities as the UAE has committed US$5 billion for Russia’s infrastructure sector, he said.
Both parties also jointly invested in nationwide cancer diagnosis and treatment network, with two centres already opened in Moscow. "We will scale it up across Russia," the CEO said.
The investments will be expanded to different sectors such as healthcare, technology [especially in Artificial Intelligence], oil and gas, and many other fields. "One of our major oil companies has partnered with ADNOC [Abu Dhabi National Oil Company]," he said.
"We are very impressed with what the UAE leadership has achieved during the past 10 to 15 years [in terms of] transparency of the UAE economy and professionalism of its institutions. They have proved their capability," the CEO concluded.
