TASHKENT, February 18. /Dunyo IA/. British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Timothy Smart, answered questions from a correspondent of Dunyo IA at the UK - Uzbekistan Infrastructure Conference:

- From your point of view that which priority areas offer the strongest potential for deepening infrastructure cooperation between Uzbekistan and United Kingdom

Given the rapid growth in bilateral trade between the UK and Uzbekistan and the wide range of expertise the UK can offer - from infrastructure and finance to digital, education and mining - how do you envision expanding this partnership further? Specifically, what new models or initiatives do you see as most promising for deepening collaboration at the government-to-government, business-to-business, and people-to-people levels, while supporting Uzbekistan’s ongoing reform agenda?

- So today is very much about building on already strong commercial business and government partnership between the UK and Uzbekistan. Two and a half years ago, we had £275 million, so $350 million-odd in bilateral trade. Today, it's £2.2 billion, I guess close to $3 billion. It's not enough. We want to do more. Your economy is growing large. We're a G7 economy, a P5 member. We have some of the world-leading academic institutions. We have access to excellent capital on the City of London to help fund your growth. We have expertise in digital, education, mining, agriculture, etc. And we can also learn from expertise in Uzbekistan.

So today is focusing on infrastructure in particular and finance models around infrastructure. So we've got 32 British companies here, also companies from Türkiye because we can do agreements with Türkiye and British companies and Uzbek companies. where if you want to build a high-speed rail, we can do some of the design. The Turkish contractors can do some of the building and the workers can be part of that, and then we can help run it.

So that kind of model. And within that, we have some really competitive financing models through Export Credit Facility, through UK Export Finance, And we have a £4 billion envelope from UK Export Finance to support these kind of projects. And that's about USD 5.5 billion worth. And we've only used less than 100 million of that. So they're real opportunities. So today is... establishing government links on this we are reinforcing the government so thank you to the foreign ministry for all the work is setting up and lord Allardyce visit the trade envoy it's been brilliant the hospitality the set piece meetings going down to Samarkand, Navoy and today this conference have been first rates a huge thank you to the foreign ministry and the government and the president for setting that all up we are so grateful but this is about what more can we do together what does that partnership look like in terms of people to people, business to business and government to government. And it's really a positive place to be in the moment, supporting the President's reform agenda.