Visite officielle de Sa Majesté Haitham bin Tarik, Sultan d'Oman.

Emmanuel MACRON

Your Majesty,
Deputy Prime Minister, ministers,
Ambassadors, representatives of the Omani and French business communities, dear friends,

Let me first reiterate my warm welcome, Your Majesty, and we are extremely happy to have you in Paris, and we had a very fruitful time together earlier with our ministers and teams. I think this is a great opportunity as well to meet with the business community here, and I want to thank all the representatives being present.

Your Majesty, you know how much we have strong links already, and I think your presence today in this well-known international context makes everybody here even more eager to cooperate and to develop additional relationships and deploy additional opportunities. First, I want to tell you that a lot of French companies and French investors being present are already very happy about the current relationship, and we signed this morning several contracts involving Suez, EDF, CMS, AGM, plus our ministries. But you have a lot of companies here in all the different sectors, and we discussed at length with His Majesty during our time together about what we want to do as well with Suez and Veolia, what we want to do with Alstom and Systra on the transport business, what we want to do with Thales, KNDS, Airbus Defence and Space, and Airbus— in all the potential from transport to energy, from defense to space, and I will not cover all the potential issues, there is a lot of appetite from the French enterprise and the French business leaders and the French investors to work with you.

Second, we want as well more of the Omani investment to be present in France. We've been over the past seven years number 1 in terms of attractiveness in Europe. I think the signature this morning of one agreement of the Omani Investment Authority, but as well as what we are establishing in additional contacts and needs to be organized in the hours to come, plus you have several funds being present here, is I think something very meaningful. In technology, as we discussed, we want clearly to establish additional contact and develop business opportunities.

My third point is to say— and I will conclude here, Your Majesty — that we want clearly to build with you a very special partnership where, through connectivity and all these different business opportunities, we clearly think that we have a key partnership. I've been very impressed by your wise strategy in the past years, and especially the past month, to say the least. We really believe that stabilization of your region is one of the critical issues. We have a lot of sovereign capacities we will deploy together and common initiatives we will take. But we really believe that the Franco-Omani partnership is as well something on which we can build additional opportunities for the whole GCC. We discussed as well about the importance of GCC, but GCC-France is as well a partnership which means a lot for us, and this is why as well these bilateral discussions will allow us to elaborate more. I will stop here. But I wanted you to know that you have here all our best companies being involved. I want to thank Medef International and our corporates to be present here, and they will probably have the opportunity to discuss with your companies and with your investors, but as well to present to you and your ministers some of their projects. But they are all backed by the French government, — and you are here— a lot of appetite to invest more and deploy common projects. Thank you very much.