Egyptian and Russian customs officials signed on Wednesday a protocol in Cairo aiming at regulating and enhancing the flow of trade between the two countries. The agreement aims at exchanging information and data between customs authorities in both countries in order to avoid irregularities and misevaluation. "It's obvious that trade without customs cannot work, and when it works it's usually through practices that perhaps harms economies more than it benefits them," said Magdi Abdel-Azeez, commissioner of the Egyptian Customs Authority, during a joint presser with Andrei Belyaninov, Director of the Russian Federal Customs Service. For his part, Belyaninov stressed that the main goal behind the protocol is to "facilitate customs processes and procedures in order to help trade between the two countries grow." The agreement comes weeks after the Russian president visited Cairo for the first time in a decade, where he met with his Egyptian counterpart and discussed possible economic cooperation with Egypt, including the construction of a nuclear power plant to generate electricity, an industrial zone, and infrastructure development. Russia is Egypt's third largest wheat supplier, providing 26.3 percent (765,000 tonnes) of the country's imports in the second half of 2014, Mamdouh Abdel Fattah, vice chairman of Egypt's grain buyer GASC said in December. The value of trade in the first quarter of the fiscal year 2014/15 between Egypt and Russia reached $ 448.3 million. http://english.ahram.org.eg/News/123921.aspx
