STRELNA, September 5 (Itar-Tass) - Russian President Vladimir Putin hopes for a constructive dialogue and that the G20 leaders will approve the negotiated decisions. The president expects a success of a G20 summit that will open in St. Petersburg on Thursday. Putin is a host of the G20 summit.
Putin acts in this role already not for the first time, particularly in the Russian northern capital. In 2003 he gathered the global leaders for celebrations of the 300th anniversary of St. Petersburg. That meeting became the first large-scale international forum of that kind in the history of modern Russia. Three years later, Russia hosted a G8 summit, which Putin also held in St. Petersburg. The journalists, who got accustomed to all debates behind closed doors at such forums, remember it for its unprecedented openness. The host of the summit gave a news conference personally each evening at the forum. It is noteworthy that next year Putin will receive the guests of a G8 summit for the second time. However, a G8 summit is planned in Sochi, but not in St. Petersburg.
Putin is known to expect a specific and subject matter content for such events, but not a meeting just to check the box. “The success of the summit will be an open positive discussion, which is aimed at a final approval of decisions,” Putin said in an interview with Russia’s TV Channel One and the U.S. news agency Associated Press ahead of a G20 summit on Tuesday evening. Putin explains that he means “the scope of measures, which seek to boost the growth of world economy and the creation of new jobs.” “Meanwhile, we proceed from an assumption that to resolve these quite important tasks we should resolve several subtasks, which are the promotion of investment, making world economy opener, the work, as I already said, in the sphere of tax administration, banking system and so on and so forth,” he added.
Putin noted that the so-called ‘St. Petersburg’s plan’ is prepared for the G20 summit to develop world economy and create new jobs. “We agreed on several other issues related with the struggle against corruption and on the measures in the struggle against the offshore zones, there is a large scope of measures in this sphere,” he noted. “Certainly, we will discuss the problems of world trade, world finances, and we will believe that the summit will pass successfully, if all the documents prepared and negotiated in advance will be adopted,” the Russian leader stated.
The president noted that he finds the work already done in the G20 framework quite useful. “We succeeded, as I believe, to agree (but we did not do it ourselves, but together with our partners and colleagues under the patronage of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)) on the main principles of the taxation system in the world,” he said. “No one has done it for the last 100 years, and this is a very important aspect of our work,” the president said with confidence.
Speaking on the agenda of the G20 summit, Putin recalled that it is primarily devoted to the debates on economic issues, economic problems in the world, economic growth problems, the struggle against unemployment, corruption, tax crimes and abuse of administrative authority. “But certainly given the situation around Syria is acute and conflict-ridden and we still fail to agree on all aspects of this very important problem, it is important to take advantage of an opportunity that the leaders of 30 leading world economies will meet in St. Petersburg, and certainly it is possible to devote some time to debates on this problem,” Putin noted. “But we will not impose this discussion, we can offer to get beyond the framework of planned debates and devote some time to the debates on the Syrian problem,” the president said. “Certainly, I will offer to my partners to discuss this issue. I hope that they will not refuse from it,” Putin added.
The G20 summit in St. Petersburg will become the 8th meeting of the G20 leaders. This forum of the international community on the most important aspects of international economic and financial agenda has been established in 2008, when an acute need for concerted actions in the struggle against the world financial crisis had emerged. Since then the United States hosted the G20 summits twice, Great Britain, Canada, South Korea, France and Mexico hosted by one G20 summit. Australia will host a G20 summit next year. A G20 summit will be held in Turkey in 2015.