Minister Girma Urges Council to
Act on Trade Policy
Minister of Trade and Industry, Girma Birru, has urged the highest
executive body of the country, the Council of Ministers, to decide
on the foreign trade regime Ethiopia is expected to submit to the
World Trade Organization (WTO), sources disclosed to Fortune.
Minister Girma
wrote the letter to the secretariat of cabinet affairs on Thursday,
August 10, insisting that the Council should deliberate on the issue
as a top priority, said these sources.
“Ethiopia has not yet submitted a Memorandum on the Foreign Trade
Regime,” says the official website of the organization on its entry
of Ethiopia. “The Working Party has not yet met.”
Joining the WTO is a very arduous process: Cambodia is the only
least developed country to have joined the organization in the short
period of one and half years. Ethiopia’s accession request was made
in January 2003 and needs to go through seven stages of negotiation
before it gets qualified for membership. The toughest part,
according to experts, will be when negotiations begin with 149
member countries, including Djibouti and Kenya, on market access for
goods and services.
Officials at
the Ministry of Revenues have amended a controversial directive that
lifted the privilege of duty free imports, only two weeks after it
was issued, sources disclosed to Fortune.
At a meeting
held on Thursday, August 10, inside the Ministry and chaired by the
State Minister Tezera Wodajo, the Ministry decided to give breathing
room to the thousands of vehicles owners whose cars were left
stranded in various ports when the controversial directive was
issued on July 24.
With the
amendment, the Ministry will let these vehicles enter into the
country until October 10, 2006, but with duty being owed. The
original directive had banned the importation of all vehicles except
in a few cases.
The Commercial
Bank of Ethiopia (CBE) is finalizing research carried out to find 13
different locations for new branches it is planning to open in Addis
Ababa. The research was carried out by the bank’s Marketing and
Corporate Communications Department.
Ayele Cherinet,
CBE manager of promotion and media relations, told Fortune
that the final decision on the expansion locations will be announced
to the public within 10 days.
Currently, CBE
has 174 branches throughout the country of which 30 are located in
Addis Ababa.
The Ministry of
Foreign Affairs (MoFA) has written a letter to the Ministry of
Revenue (MoR) requesting that the latter review its decision to
prohibit duty free privileges to Ethiopian diplomats returning from
duty stations.
The Ministry of
Revenue through its new directive that lifts any rights of bringing
in duty free cars for private use has denied these privileges to 70
Ethiopian diplomats returning home.
Duty free
privileges for Beirut returnees, which were lifted following the
release of a new Directive by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, have
been reinstated, effective August 05.
The returnees
will now return under the same legal designation covered by the new
(and controversial) duty free directive released by the Ministry of
Revenue last month.
Previously, the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs had announced that the privileges of the
returnees had been lifted, as ministry officials had lost contact
with the Ethiopian Embassy in Beirut due to the war between Israel
and Hezbollah that started on July 12, 2006. The duty free repeal
was announced a week after the day of the beginning of the war.
The
Investment Commission of the Oromia Regional State has rented a 50ht
plot to Derba MIDROC Cement Plc for two years, which the company
plans to use as a depot for imported cement.
Following the increasing demand for cement that has put
unprecedented pressure on the three cement factories operating in
the country since September 2005, the federal government has allowed
private companies to import cement from overseas.
Girma Birru, minister of Trade and Industry, and Sheik Mohammed Al-Amoudi,
chairman of MIDROC Ethiopia, signed an agreement on June 29,
allowing Derba MIDROC, established with 2.4 billion Br capital, to
import up to 1.5 million tonnes of cement for the year, duty free
and exempted of VAT.
Code of Conduct to Improve Image of Flower Business
The Ethiopian
Horticulture Producers Exporters Association (EHPE) is to draft a
code of conduct for the horticulture industry. The code was mainly
initiated by the negative impact the industry is creating with some
segments of the public.
Officials from
the association disclosed that the industry is too often considered
to be of guilty of several offences, like taking advantage of unfair
labor conditions, making land unusable and playing a role in
contaminating water resources. The code of conduct is expected to
address these conception and give responses to them.
Punishing
investors accused of showing inadequate advancement in their
projects, the Oromia Investment Commission has repossessed 324ht of
land from 24 flower farming developers. The decision was based on
Commission evaluations carried out since last May.
According to Leta
Abebe, acting commissioner, the developers had not shown the
expected progress during the evaluations.
“We are not
interested in whatever reason they have for the delay of the
construction,” he said. “We need potential developers that can
invest their money and time quickly, and who need the plot now.”
The Ethiopian
Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) awarded a contract to United
System Integrators plc (USI) for the supply of computer networking
equipment including 300 thin client servers, desktops, switches and
printers, all worth nine million birr.
EEPCO will use
the networking materials for its Management Information System that
will work on a new network framework for its De Gaulle Square head
office in Piassa.
Mihret Debebe,
EEPCO General Manager, told Fortune that this project will
facilitate management’s work performance and that they see this
project as a sensitive one. Both EEPCO and USI officials said that
they do not want to comment before the end of the work. EEPCO will
use its own employees for the network’s installation.
Prosecutor Drops Charges against Six DBE Officials
The Federal
Ethics and Anti-Corruption Commision Prosecutor dropped charges
against six of 12 Development Bank of Ethiopia (DBE) officials
accused of corruption and set a bail amount of 3,500 – 4000 birr to
five others in a hearing tree weeks ago. The bank officials were
accused of corruption and had been jailed for the last two and half
months. Former DBE president Moges Chemere was sent back to prison.
All of them
were charged in connection to a 86.7 million Br loan DBE advanced to
private company, Addis Industry Ltd, which, according to the
Commission, was an abuse of position and abuse of DBE’s policies by
illegally benefiting bank employees.
The
Construction and Business Bank (CBB) has suspended the provision of
new loans to its clients, a decidion it made at the end of July
2006.The bank had granted close to 600 million Br in loans by the
end of this Ethiopian fiscal year, while their plan was to loan out
only half that much.
According to a
bank official, the loan moratorium will continue until the end of
September 2006.
However, he
also noted that another reason for the loan freeze was that the bank
is undergoing a study on how to minimize its risks with borrowers.
“Right now
close to 40pc of the loans given out to the construction industry
are quite risky,” he said.
EEPCo Hires
Consultants for Power Export Project to Djibouti
At a cost of 33.8 million Br, the
Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo) has hired two
international consulting firms, RSW International Inc from Canada
and PB Power from the UK, to consult for the 60 million dollar
Ethio-Djiboutih Power Interconnection Project.
The
two countries had signed a bilateral agreement in 1999 initiating
the spirit of the project that was launched two years later. In
2005, a loan agreement was signed with the African Development Bank
providing 20.8 million dollars financing. The Ethiopian government,
is providing the balance.
EEPCO’s General Manager, Mihret Debebe, RSW International Inc. Vice
President, Émile Marquis, and PB Power’s Power Networks Director,
Nick J.L. Randles, signed the agreement on Wednesday, August 9,
2006.
Financial bid
documents for the supply of 4,176 stands for 42 -inch plasma TV
screens found in schools across the country were opened on Friday
August 11. The Procurement Services Enterprise (PSE) floated the
tender last June.
Representatives
from 13 companies were present at the opening, all of them local.
The highest bidder was Country Trading offering 17.5 million Br. The
lowest offer was by Abadir Engineering at 7.2 million Br. All bids
cover cost of production, delivery and installation at the schools.
The plasma
stands are to be distributed all over the country; the Amhara
region will receive 1,280 units, Benishangul 87, Southern Nation
Nationalities and Peoples Regional State 406, Somali region 106,
Tigray 74, Afar 53, Dire Dawa 52, Harrar 80, Gambella 38, Oromia
1,445 and Addis Ababa 555.
Pioneer
Diagnostics Center, a private company established with five
shareholders of Ethio-Americans, has imported the second hi-tech
medical machine known as Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), at a cost
of over 600,000 dollars.
With close to
60pc of the company owned by Girum Teklemariam (MD), the Center was
established four months ago with five million Br capital. It is the
second company in Ethiopia to import the machine that helps doctors
have a better diagnosis of their patients, with examination results
from a high quality images of the inside of the human body.
First
discovered by Noble laureates Felix Bloch and Edward Purcell in
1946, MRI is a technique used by scientists to obtain microscopic
chemical and physical information about molecules in the body,
according to Encarta Encyclopidea.
New
Construction Institute to Fight Project Delays
Sileshi
Consult, one of the 22 construction consulting firms in the country
is to open a construction management training centre. The project is
a joint venture with the Nehru Institute of Construction and
Enterprise (NICE)of India.
Established 14
years ago, Sileshi most recently did the consultancy work for the
construction of the National Bank of Ethiopia headquarters and the
Ethiopian Academy of Financial Study which was built around Akaki
town.
On Thursday
August 17, Meet ETV will host two of the four musicians that make up
the Fab Four, a group that performs at the Sheraton Addis Office Bar
every Thursday and Friday Night from 8pm onwards.
Meet ETV is the
setting for an interview panel hosted by Tefera Gedamu. Aired every
Thursday evening at 10:30pm on the Ethiopian Television network, it
is a one hour long program with a variety of guests ranging from
government officials, society icons, to foreign dignitaries visiting
Ethiopia.
On Thursday
August 17, Meet ETV will host two of the four musicians that make up
the Fab Four, a group that performs at the Sheraton Addis Office Bar
every Thursday and Friday Night from 8pm onwards. They play a mix of
oldies, jazz and soul.
The Ethiopian
Telecommunications Corporation (ETC) signed an agreement on July 31
for the purchase of switchboard station upgrading equipment from
Huawei Technologies after a five-month delay. ETC awarded the tender
to the Chinese company in March 2006 for 4.9 million dollars.
The tender,
which was floated at the beginning of the year, included other
participants like Zhongxing Telecom Equipment (ZTE) also of China.
ETC will distribute the equipment to all its 260 switchboard
stations around the country.
Officials from
ETC told Fortune that the supply of equipment should have
begun a month after the winner was announced, but because of the ETC
management reshuffle that took place in May 2006, the agreement
signing was delayed.
It had become a
widely held truth that the duty free privilege offered to returning citizens,
diplomats and the disabled had considerably revolutionized the country's private
car market since the privilege's inception in 2001. But now the duty free
benefit has been rescinded and the effects of the change are only beginning to
be discovered. Tagu Zergaw, Fortune Staff Writer, gauged first reactions.
The trade negotiations aimed
at creating an open global trading environment, whereby goods and services are
freely exchanged across territories, suffered a major set back a couple of weeks
ago, when the talks collapsed in Geneva. Trading of blame followed with each
major party or alliance pointing fingers at the other. Joseph E. Stiglitz (PhD),
the Nobel laureate economist, argues that ....
Aid thinking
moves in policy cycles, and the dogma for now, at least for the big
European donors, is to give aid directly to governments. It is not
given completely blindly, of course, and developing countries have
to put in place poverty reduction strategies that add up.
If there are
people who question the intellectual caliber of Prime Minister Meles
Zenawi, they should look at a recent paper that resembles a doctoral
dissertation. Maybe it is. The 51-page rundown of what is to be a
book is available at....
My tall Gojame friend called Thursday afternoon to kindly give me
some information that I needed. He enquired about what I was writing
about, and I ......
Trucks with heavy loads
deteriorate road infrastructure disproportionably. That is why so many of the
country's main routes are coming apart so quickly. In order to stave off
complete destruction of our roads, legal norms need to be perfected and, above
all, enforced.
I have been in a sort of vacuum for a while now, large
parts of my life have been shut out. This has been kind of peaceful,
not having to deal with anyone for whatever reason. But as the days
passed me by, I realized that maybe this was not such a good thing.
A week has elapsed since the catastrophic flood hit Dire Dawa
leaving behind over 200 people dead, some 300 missing and over
10,000 homeless, but the country is still in a state of mourning the
bereaved. We were used to watching such disasters and calamities
only on TV and cinema screens or from international sources about
Tsunami- like storms killing hundreds of people in a matters of
minute. We have not seen such a disaster of similar proportions in
recent years anywhere else in this country as we have seen in Dire
Dawa last weekend.
The price of cement is escalating unabated; there seems to
be no stop to it with a retail sales of a quintal of cement traded
between 275 Br to 280 Br last week. With the largest cement factory,
Mugar, partially closed for maintenance for three months, the issue
has become not only about price, but also whether it will be
available at all.
