31.10.2012: III High Level Working Group Meeting on Guarantees

Following the last meetings of 19 March 2011 and 1-2 December2012, the Secretariat of the Union for the Mediterranean will hold the Third High Level Working Group Meeting on Guarantees which aims at discussing and endorsing the business plan of the Euro-Mediterranean Guarantee Network.

The Working Group will be chaired by Lino Cardarelli, Senior Deputy Secretary General of the UfM Secretariat, and managed by Dr. Rym Ayadi, Senior Research Fellow at the Center for European Policy Studies.

The objective of the Euro-Mediterranean Guarantee Network (EMGN) initiative is to facilitate training and exchange of best practices to improve the institutional environment, as well as to conduct research and studies on the feasibility to foster Counter-Guarantee Funds to support medium and small enterprises in the Mediterranean partner countries. Promoting research and developing analytical tools to create guarantee instruments -in particular those dedicated to micro, small and medium sized enterprises- are of utmost importance in the project.

The UfM Secretariat launched the EMGN initiative last March 2012 with the Memorandum of Understanding signed between the Secretariat and credit guarantee Agencies for Micro, Small and Medium sized enterprises from Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine and Lebanon.

The meeting is scheduled to take place on 31 October 2012 at Palau de Pedralbes in Barcelona from10.00 to 14.00