The MOU was inked in a ceremony attended by the Secretary of Iran’s Free Zones High Council Hojatollah Abdolmaleki and Acting Head of Anzali Free Zone Organization Akbar Niazi, IRIB reported.
Under the framework of the MOU, the Afghan company will invest $50 million in the construction of three wharves at the Caspian Port Complex in cooperation with a domestic company as a Joint Venture (JV).
In the signing ceremony, Niazi said, “The foreign investor will ink the contract for investment at the Caspian Port within the next three months.”
Abdolmaleki for his part pointed to the importance of attraction of foreign investment in free zones and stated that defining incentive packages to attract Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in collaboration with domestic companies is among the main strategies of Iran’s Free Zones High Council.
He invited both domestic and foreign investors to seize the opportunity of investing in the country’s free zones.
According to the official, the MOU inked for $50 million of investment of an Afghan company at the Caspian Port will strengthen the transit, logistics, and infrastructures of this port.
In a recent interview conducted by the Tehran Times, Abdolmaleki has said that in the past, the amount of foreign investment made in the zones was very limited and the reason was that the investment opportunities and capacities in these areas were not well introduced, adding, “This year, we started a program that, thank God, is working very well, and that is preparing investment packages and introducing them to domestic and foreign investors.”
These packages are in fact a preliminary feasibility study plan that shows the profitability of that plan, the amount of capital required, the required raw materials, technical and technological issues, consumer and market, which is actually the feasibility studies of that project and it shows whether the project is profitable or not, he added.
This is the first part of our investment package, and the second part of our investment package is the necessary permits to carry out the work, including the land supply permit, water, electricity, and other infrastructure permits, and the construction permit that we have prepared, the official announced, adding, “Therefore, a package has been prepared that contains both the economic studies plan and the permits, and this package is anonymous, that is, the entire investment process is ready for an unknown person, and the interested person comes and announces, and if he is qualified, he will receive a license. The name will be given to him immediately and the work can be started from tomorrow. And this is the first time that such work is done in free and special zones.”
“In the first phase, last month, we unveiled 370 investment packages worth almost five billion euros and presented them at Iran Expo. And in the four days of the exhibition, about one-fifth of these projects, worth nearly one billion euros, reached an initial memorandum of understanding with domestic and foreign investors”, the secretary of Iran’s Free Zones High Council further informed.
“We regularly produce these packages, which are registered online on the secretariat’s website. According to the latest statistics, 528 investment packages worth almost 5.5 billion euros have been registered”, he added.
