UAE hopes to finalise CEPA with Turkiye soon: Minister Al Zeyoudi

05 Sep '22

2 min read

Pic: Shutterstock

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is hopeful of finalising a comprehensive economic partnership agreement (CEPA) with Turkiye in the near future, according to the former’s foreign trade minister Thani Ahmed Al Zeyoudi. The negotiations were launched around four months ago and the agreement aims at removing trade barriers and cutting tariffs.

“We are aiming to finalize the #UAETurkiyeCEPA in the coming weeks, and build deeper, more meaningful trade and investment ties with one of the region’s most important economies,” Al Zeyoudi wrote on Twitter, retweeting a post by his Turkish counterpart Mehmet Mus.

“We discussed the current state of the ongoing negotiations of Türkiye-UAE #CEPA and the steps to be taken to finalize the agreement,” Mus said on Twitter.

The deal will enable both the countries to achieve a bilateral trade volume of nearly $15 billion, Mus said in late April when the two countries officially launched talks on the CEPA. The CEPA is expected to double trade between the two nations, Al Zeyoudi was quoted as saying by Turkish media reports.

The UAE is pursuing several bilateral CEPAs and has signed trade deals with India, Israel and Indonesia this year.

The UAE is the largest trading partner of Turkiye in the Middle East with a bilateral trade volume of around $8 billion. The turnover had dropped to around $6.9 billion in 2018, before rebounding to nearly $7.9 billion in 2019, according to the official data. The volume rose further to $8.3 billion in 2020 despite the pandemic, before slipping slightly to $7.6 billion last year.

The trade in the first seven months of this year was worth nearly $5.2 billion.

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