ICPE meets Inter-American Development Bank

Director General of ICPE Dr Štefan Bogdan Šalej and Executive Manager of ICPE Mr T. Rogelj met with Mr Yasusuke Tsukagoshi, Executive Director and Mr Hrvoje Mršic, Counselor of Inter-American Development Bank (“IDB”).  The meeting was hosted by the Ministry of Finance of the Republic of Slovenia represented by Mr Mitja Mavko, Head of International Finance Department and Mr Robert Rampre of the same department.

Following the presentation of ICPE’s activities Dr Šalej invited representatives of IDB to participate and to be sponsor of the “High Level Meeting of the State Ownership Authorities” which will be organized by ICPE in September. ICPE would also appreciate the presentation of IDB’s involment and experience in approaching the public sector companies.

The second topic was ICPE’s efforts to establish “procurement assistance center” (“PAC”) to foster trade and investments also through IDB and to serve as a gate for the companies from the region to international financial institutions. Launched in 1999 by the World Bank the private sector liaison officers (PSLO) network has turned into an IFI business outreach platform, also used by IDB, EBRD, AFDB, and ADB, managed by the WBG. The PSLO network is a network of presently 110 business intermediary organizations (chambers of commerce and industry, business and trade associations, or investment promotion agencies) in 81 countries working to foster trade and investment between countries with the support of IFI’s products and services. ICPE will act through PAC in co-operation with the Slovenian Chamber of Commerce as PSLO.

Mr Tsukagoshi has welcomed the ICPE efforts and explained IDB’s practice with procurement process and indicated that the system of procurement was recently decentralized at IDB so that regional offices have the reasponsability to run the projects and that the PAC should contact IDB’s 26 regional offices in order to use business opportunities.

Mr Mavko stressed that the Slovenian Ministry of Finance supports ICPE in the efforts to start with PAC and will offer it’s full support.