Business takes centre stage at EU-Russia summit 

The annual meeting of the Round table of Industrialists of Russia and the EU is designed to coincide with the EU-Russia summit, where Russia's President Dmitry Medvedev will meet his French counterpart and holder of the EU Presidency Nicolas Sarkozy, Commission President José Manuel Barroso and several commissioners. 

Speaking to the press in Brussels, Vladimir Chizhov, the Russian Ambassador to the EU, said that Medvedev would address the business forum on the 13th, while business leaders would come up with a joint message to the summit the next day "in the form of recommendations". 

French and Russian ministers, as well as EU commissioners, will participate in the business gathering, which will be co-chaired by Anatoly Chubais of Russia, who until recently was president of United Electrical Company of Russia. Today, he heads Russia's nanotechnologies holding. The other co-chair is the CEO of the shipping company Maersk, Nils Smegaard Andersen. 

Joint GPS project? 

Chizhov said there was a "need for complementarity" between Russia and the EU in developing technologies, citing the EU's Galileo global positioning project and the similar Russian project GLONASS. 

"The only way we can jointly compete on the world market with the American GPS is to combine our efforts," said Chizhov, who also added nanotechnologies to the list, a sector which in Russia is under the responsibility of the Alexey Chubais, the co-chairman of the Cannes business meeting. 

Business as usual? 

The Russian ambassador reacted with irony to attempts to portray the EU-Russian relations following the Georgia crisis as "not business as usual". 

"How else can business be? Better than usual?," he mused. 

The recent Georgia crisis has not in fact prevented business relations between Russia and France from flourishing, as shown recently by the visit of French Prime Minister François Fillon to the Black Sea resort of Sotchi (EurActiv 22/09/08). Chizhov recalled that the business community had recommended starting negotiations on a new basic treaty last year during a similar EU-Russia event in Lisbon. 

Just days ago, on 10 November, EU foreign affairs ministers decided to proceed with negotiations over a new EU-Russia basic treaty, disregarding the objections of Lithuania (EurActiv 11/11/08 ). The negotiations had been "postponed" following the short August war between Georgia and Russia. Chizhov only briefly stated his satisfaction over the decision, adding that the talks were at least as important for the EU as they were for his country. He said he expected the talks to resume before the end of the year. 

This time the business forum will also address the current world economic crisis, the Russian Ambassador said. Medvedev, Sarkozy and Barroso will fly from Nice to Washington after lunch on the 14th to attend the G20 summit, which is expected to launch reform of the world financial system. 

No written Russian position 

Unlike the EU, which adopted concrete proposals to deal with the crisis at its recent extraordinary summit (EurActiv 07/11/08 ), Russia has not made its position publicly known ahead of the G20 summit. A recent statement by President Medvedev reads that Russia will not allow the redesign of new rules of financial architecture to be "instrumentalised by any one country or group of countries, or one economic system that will make others pay for its gross errors". 

Chizhov said that no economy, including Russia's, was immune to the global crisis, but he said his country was in a somewhat better position due to the modest size of the Russian stock market, the small number of shareholders and the accumulated "safety cushion" of liquidity reserves. 

The Russian diplomat said his country welcomed the initiative to convene the G20 summit, but was not under any illusions that it would "solve all the problems in one Saturday". 

“This will probably launch a process of further discussions, perhaps further summits, in various formats and compositions,” he said. He also expressed hopes that Medvedev’s initiative for developing a new architecture of European and Euro-Atlantic security, which recently received a positive French reaction (EurActiv 09/10/08), will also be “subject of detailed discussions” in Nice.