Uzbekistan and China signed investment deals worth more than $5 billion and agreed to expand natural gas supplies during a visit by President Islam Karimov to Beijing this week, Uzbek state media reported on Thursday. Leading Chinese banks agreed to open credit lines worth $1.5 billion to four Uzbek banks to help implement various investment projects in Central Asia's most populous republic, the UzA state news agency reported, without naming the banks involved.
The two countries also agreed to construct the Uzbek spur of the Central Asia-China natural gas pipeline, which will allow Uzbekistan to supply an extra 25 billion cubic metres annually to China, the agency reported on its website, www.uza.uz. It gave no additional details about the gas pipeline deal.
The spur will connect to the Central Asia-China pipeline, which began pumping gas from neighbouring Turkmenistan in late 2009 and snakes nearly 2,000 km (1,250 miles) through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to reach China's north-western Xinjiang region. China, which shares a 2,800-km (1,740-mile) border with Central Asia, has invested billions of dollars in recent years to carve out a substantial share of the former Soviet region's vast reserves of oil, gas and industrial metals.
Comments
Comments are closed for this article.