Azerbaijan to invest USD26b in foreign property

Azerbaijan's oil fund's executive director, Shakhmar Movsumov, said that this year, the oil producing country would invest in publicly traded shares and property with cash from its USD26 billion daily oil fund.

Movsumov added that the fund financed social spending and infrastructure projects, including construction of irrigation systems and of the Baku-Tbilisi-Kars railway in addition to the support of refugees using revenues from oil contracts, oil and gas sales and transit fees.

He said that this month, the fund's assets were USD25.8 billion compared with USD22.8 billion at the end of 2010 adding that the fund's assets are equivalent to the budgets of some countries.

Movsumov said that the country would invest some of these funds in new fields such as overseas real estate, to increase its revenues and to protect itself from inflation, leaving about eighty percent of the assets in sovereign paper.


/AzerTAc/