Spanish:
 
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Bolivia offers guarantees as business frets
AFP
VIENNA
Petroleumworld.com 05 13 06
International businessmen reacted with cautious optimism Friday as Bolivia offered legal guarantees to foreign firms to calm concern after saying they would not be compensated for nationalized oil and gas resources.
"It sounds like a move in the right direction," an Austrian official said on the sidelines of a business forum at an EU-Latin American and Caribbean (EU-LAC) summit in Vienna.
"We are trying to ensure that within 180 days we can agree on new contracts of mutual interest ... with all the conditions necessary to provide genuine, long-lasting legal security for the companies," Bolivian President Evo Morales said in a letter to Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Moratinos, which was released Friday.
Just prior to the letter's publication the EU-LAC business forum warned that industry can only cement long-term economic growth in developing countries if those states cooperate in providing a proper framework for foreign companies to operate.
With energy and trade dominating the agenda at the summit, forum participants said political uncertainty sent out a negative signal to firms seeking to invest in developing nations.
"Investor security has to be respected, and foreign investors have to be respected the same as national producers," said Austrian Minister of Finance Martin Bartenstein in allusion to Bolivia's May 1 energy nationalisation, which sent shockwaves through the world's business community.
Austrian Chancellor and summit host Wolfgang Schussel stressed that Bolivia had to realise that "if you want foreign investment you have to safeguard, (and provide) secure frameworks to do business, to invest money -- especially in the energy sector."
UN Secretary General Kofi Annan waded into the debate by observing that globalisation meant creating optimum conditions for investment.
"The global economy is so inter-connected that what happens in one country has an impact on the other," Annan said.
"The relationship has to be such that international trade and the exchanges can take place with confidence and that investors can also assume that the conditions under which they are making an investment will be sustained over the medium to the long term," Annan said.
AFP 12 1507 GMT 05 06
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