Morocco, Iraq set up business council

Moroccan and Iraqi economic operators have set up a business council that will explore ways of energizing bilateral partnership.

The council, set up by the Moroccan employers' association (CGEM) and the Iraqi businessmen's association, will also seek means of promoting complementarity, enhancing trade exchanges and giving incentives to joint ventures, mainly those operating in maritime transport.

The two sides undertake to resort to arbitration to settle disputes in matters of trade and investment.

Moroccan Secretary of state for foreign trade, Abdelkrim Ben Atiq, who attended the council setting up ceremony underlined the need for a legal framework to regulate trade and industrial investments between the two states' private operators and called businessmen to explore new partnership opportunities other than the traditional trade exchanges, to encompass the sectors of services, new technologies and all industrial branches.

CGEM president, Hassan Chami, voiced Moroccan businessmen's resolve to extend all necessary assistance to their Iraqi peers to help them meet Iraq's economic needs, while the chairman of the Iraqi businessmen association, Thamir Chekhi, underlined the need to foster inter-Arab cooperation through the setting up of an Arab common market, that would ease the free movement of Arab capital between Arab states.