British Embassy bulletin by UKTI
"Waiting for … Sir Andrew Cahn"
Visit to Hungary: 5-6 February 2009
Sir Andrew Cahn is the Chief Executive of UK Trade & Investment (UKTI), our parent organisation, which is responsible for marketing the UK overseas, promoting British exports and attracting inward investment. As part of his job, Sir Andrew does lot of travelling to overseas to deliver the key messages of UKTI.
This time he is visiting our region, Hungary and Bulgaria and his message is that international co-operation, open markets and innovation are what’s needed to guide us through to global economic recovery. He will make clear that the UK highly values Hungary as its trading partner within the European Union. He will throw light on the matter why Hungarian business should choose the UK as a preferred business partner; and how the UK fares as a place to do business in the current global economy.
The country he is visiting is always at the centre of interest of UK exporters – our main clients and customers -, this is one of the reasons why we are so excited to have him here. Our UKTI Section at the British Embassy Budapest will also have the opportunity to meet with our "big boss", ask questions and share burning issues with him seeking for his views.
Preparation for the visit – Final Countdown
It’s been a busy couple of weeks since we started the programme preparation for Sir Andrew’s visit to Hungary. As usual on these occasions, dozens of telephone calls and e-mails have been made/sent to ensure that the planned meetings are confirmed, useful background information are ready for Andrew to hold talks with counterparts, ... etc. A last check during our weekly meeting on Monday 2nd February, and the final countdown until Andrew’s arrival on Thursday has started. Four more days of fever-high expectations.
On Tuesday morning our initial enthusiasm is a bit shaded by the latest news coming from London. "South-East England saw the worst snow for 18 years, paralysing all traffic means in London." It is likely that the weather will not be gracious with London during the next coming days, and if so a new question arises; How is Sir Andrew going to hit the ground running if planes don’t fly? It is, however, not only Sir Andrew’s arrival we are worried about: our Ambassador has already spent 24 hours at the airport and Sir Andrew is meant to be staying with him.
Wednesday
Although the programme was finalised last week, we are still chasing people and their assistant for CVs. It is important that Sir Andrew Cahn receives background information and information about the people whom he will meet in time.
It would be nice if the whole team could meet Sir Andrew Cahn as it is a unique opportunity for us to meet our CEO. But there are still news about snow in the UK and we are worried about a colleague who is on a mission there. Besides some virus is lurking on the floor we work and more and more colleagues fall victim to it.
Thursday
A couple of hours to go until Sir Andrew Cahn arrives today. Our section is quite busy with the usual tasks, and our Head of Section is away almost for the whole day as there are several events about transparency issues. Fortunately we have not heard of any regrets regarding the meetings with Sir Andrew Cahn so far, though a number of people are unwell and unable to attend the dinner, which is Sir Andrew’s first engagement right after his arrival.
Having re-arranged the dining room table at the last minute, everyone arrives and we sit down for a discussion about the positive aspects of doing business in Hungary – and there are many, with investors confirming that they intend to re-invest in Hungary. The discussion moves on to some of the challenges around doing business here – particularly local government bureaucracy and a lack of transparency. There are also concerns about the impact on consumers in Hungary in the current economic situation. Many British companies operate in the services sector and so customers are very important.
Friday
We arrived at CEU bright and early for a meeting between Sir Andrew Cahn and Minister Gordon Bajnai. There was an interesting discussion about the challenges facing both our countries and some thoughts about how we could work together. Both men agreed that trade and investment was one of the answers and we hope that we will be kept busy keeping those flows going. They also agreed that the book "Yes, Minister" is very entertaining and instructive about some aspects of relations between Ministers and officials.
Sir Andrew and Minister Bajnai then delivered keynote speeches at a seminar at CEU. This was the first in a series of seminars and they certainly got the event off to a good start with though provoking speeches and plenty of questions.
Sir Andrew then went on to meet ITDH – UKTI’s Hungarian equivalent, members of the British Chamber of Commerce in Hungary and the State Secretary for Transport where they talked about railway privatisation, an issue which most people from Britain have a view on. Sir Andrew suggested to the State Secretary that maybe Hungary can learn from the UK’s mistakes as well as from the positive experiences.
Sir Andrew then spent some time with us at the Embassy getting to know the UKTI team and also had a chance to speak to Embassy staff. Sir Andrew ended the formal part of his visit with another dinner at which there was a lively discussion about the world’s first global economic crisis and what some of the ways forward might be for Hungary and the UK.
Our job now is to ensure that we follow up on the discussions Sir Andrew had and to ensure that people who are interested can find out what he did while he was here. We have captured some of this in our blog, we will post the CEU speeches on the website and there was lots of media coverage for us to send back to London. We will also send a report of the visit so our colleagues in London and the region know how it all went. We also need to start planning for the next seminar in the series with CEU and of course for the next official visitor – our blogs will tell you how that goes.
