By Justine Irish D. Tabile, Reporter
THE PHILIPPINES and the UK are expected to sign an export finance agreement within three months, the British ambassador said, involving an allocation for the Philippines of about 5 billion pounds (P375 billion).
Ambassador Laure Beaufils said late Wednesday that UK Export Finance will support British firms’ participation in infrastructure projects like bridges, railroads, offshore wind farms, and ports.
“We hope that (the agreement) will happen over the course of the next three months. We are very hopeful of that,” Ms. Beaufils told reporters.
“It is really about supporting British exports to the Philippines… (the financing) can take the form of guarantees or support a loan from a bank; it can take a lot of different forms to enable the Philippines to basically buy British products,” she said.
“Our export finance offer (requires that) only 20% of the project has British content. You can have a big project with only 20% British content” that can be financed, she added.
She called Philippine interest in joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) a “great development.”
“More important and interesting for us is the possibility of the Philippines joining CPTPP, which could be a great development because we see it as the gold standard of trade agreements. And I know the Philippines has been looking at that as a possibility,” she said.
“For us that would be great because then the Philippines would accede to that existing big family of trading partners that are using the gold standard,” she added.
She said that joining the CPTPP makes more sense for the Philippines than negotiating bilateral free trade agreements with the members of the partnership.
Regarding US tariffs, she said the Philippines will have some difficulty attracting companies seeking to relocate from high-tariff countries.
“The challenge for the Philippines is that the cost of energy is so high and it doesn’t really have a manufacturing base that’s ready right now. And that’s going to be the challenge in terms of whether the Philippines can benefit from higher tariffs on other ASEAN countries,” she said.
“It won’t happen overnight, I suspect,” she added.
However, she said there is a lot of interest from British tech and cyber companies as well as companies providing financial services.
According to the ambassador, the UK’s new trade envoy, George Freeman, will be visiting the Philippines in May.
“I think that’s going to be a really exciting moment in our trade as well because he’s going to try to really dig down on some of these sectors. And in particular, tech, because he’s an expert in science and tech, to see what more we can do to turbocharge our relationship,” she added.