President Asif Ali Zardari on Friday invited the Russian business houses to invest in infrastructure projects in Pakistan, for which equity may be raised through the local stock exchanges.
President Zardari’s short visit to historic St Petersburg on the second leg of his visit to Russia culminated in a decision to task Russia’s leading hydro power conglomerate prepare feasibility for building small 5-10 MW run-of-the-flow hydro power plants throughout the length and breadth of Pakistan to serve as captive power source for local industrial complexes and domestic consumption.
Briefing newsmen Presidential Spokesperson Farhatullah Babar said, in his address the president said the future prosperity of the region lay in energy pipelines, railways and other connectivity project. “As political leader of my country, I can open the doors for you and it is for the businessmen to take advantage for closer business relations between the two countries,” Babar quoted Zardari as saying.
President Zardari said the first official visit of Pakistan’s head of the state in 37 years had been undertaken in the belief that time had come for the two countries to forget the legacy of the Cold War era and forge new relations for the benefit of their people and the region. “There is no reason to remain mired in the distrust of the past, he said, and pleaded for forgetting the past, arranging for the present to face the future.”
He stayed in St Petersburg for less than three hours before leaving for Pakistan. He was seen off at the St Petersburg airport by Russian official and Pakistan’s Ambassador in Moscow Khalid Khan Khattak.
