President Pajtić met with the President of the Parliament of Baden-Württemberg

Salzburg, Austria, 27 August – Participating in the third annual assembly of the Institute of the Regions of Europe, the President of the Executive Council of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina, Bojan Pajtić, MA, had a meeting with Peter Straub, President of the State Parliament of Baden-Württemberg. Predrag Novikov, Director of the Office for European Affairs, also attended the meeting. The meeting addressed the strengthening of relations between Vojvodina and Baden-Württemberg, a region with a population of eleven million and one of the strongest economies in Germany, with Stuttgart being its capital. ”I would like to use the opportunity to invite businesspeople of Baden-Württemberg to invest in our country, while the administration will do everything to ease the investment. The fact that the number of the unemployed in Vojvodina has decreased by nine percent over the last six months speaks in favour of our readiness to open new workplaces”, said President Pajtić.

Peter Straub specially emphasized the importance of Vojvodina’s Europeisation and greeted the support provided to national minorities in Vojvodina, among them to Germans as well, through the support for Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV), education, culture and especially, strengthening of international relations. During the discussion, Mr. Straub invited President Pajtić to visit with the delegation of the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina the representation office of Baden-Württemberg in “the capital of Europe”, Brussels during the OPEN DAYS early October. Common European projects and new aspects of cooperation would be discussed in the meetings then. Likewise, the President of the German region accepted the invitation of President Pajtić to visit Vojvodina with German businesspeople, so that they could learn about favourable investment conditions of our economy. To serve as a reminder, the meetings have been held during the assembly of the Institute of the Regions of Europe, whose member the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina became in 2006 through the Office for European Affairs. ”I have invited investors from Europe, first of all from Germany and Austria, to invest in Vojvodina at this international event, which is attended by more than a hundred of European regions. We have had bilateral meetings with the President of the Assembly of Baden-Württemberg and the Bavarian Minister of Economy. We have agreed on the visit of their investors to Vojvodina and providing logistics for investing their businesspeople into our companies. We have talked about the process of privatization, which is in progress in our country and about the potential privatization offers for the opening of new workplaces and factories, which would be branches of companies in both countries. It has been agreed that the delegation of the provincial Government will be present at the OPEN DAYS that the state of Baden-Württemberg is organizing in Brussels in October and at which all European regions will be present and when we will agree on further steps in cooperation related to economy, culture and education. Both the President of the Assembly of Baden-Württemberg and the Bavarian Minister of Economy have accepted the invitation to come to Novi Sad with their associates in order to continue cooperation by defining areas of cooperation and allocating persons who would be realizing it. I have also held a presentation on the potential the energy sector of Vojvodna offers, on renewable sources of energy, as well as our future, on the ways and areas in which cooperation could be established, such as the use of biomass, construction of small and medium size hydro-electric power stations in Vojvodina and the use of wind. A large number of investors are already interested in these areas and I expect that in the months to come, we will have concrete results of these discussions and of the interest businesspeople have shown today.”