Press releases

15 Mar 2016

Minsk wins two Financial Times awards

MINSK, 15 March (BelTA) – Minsk has won two awards of fDi Magazine, which is a news and foreign direct investment publication of the UK newspaper Financial Times. The award ceremony for cities with leading positions in fDi Magazine’s rankings took place in Cannes, France on 15 March as part of the 27^th international show for real estate professionals MIPIM, BelTA learned from the Embassy of Belarus in France.

This year Minsk has received awards in two nominations — Top 25 Major European Cities of the Future – Cost Effectiveness and Top 10 Major Cities — FDI Strategy. Minsk Mayor Andrei Shorets received the awards from fDi Magazine Editor-in-Chief Courtney Fingar in Cannes.

As many as 223 cities have taken part in the contest this year. As many as 96 independent indicators were taken into account to make the rankings. The calculations were made by top fDi Magazine experts, who evaluated economic potential, human resources, the cost of doing business, living standards, quality of the infrastructure, the ease of doing business, and the strategy for raising foreign direct investments. The best city in the overall ranking of all cities was chosen. Then every city was evaluated in separate rankings for major, medium, small cities and microcities. Along with Minsk this year’s awardees include London, Moscow, Lisbon, Kiev, Vilnius, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Zagreb, Ljubljana and other ones.

MIPIM traditionally gathers the most influential players in various sectors of the international real estate market: office premises, residential premises, retail, healthcare, sport, logistics, and the production sector. The trade show offers its participants a unique access to a large number of civil engineering projects and sources of funding in the form of investment companies from developed economies. Apart from that, presentations of capital cities and major metropolitan areas by their mayors took place during the forum. About 2,700 companies from nearly 90 countries took part in this year’s trade show.

While in Cannes Minsk Mayor Andrei Shorets is also expected to take part in the Mayors’ Think Tank — Housing the World on 16 March. Negotiations with representatives of major French and Spanish companies, which are implementing or plan to implement investment projects in Minsk, have been planned. The number includes the Accor Group and the companies ACS Industrial and Concerto ED. During the trade show Andrei Shorets also met with Kiev Mayor Vitaly Klichko and representatives of the Moscow and Saint Petersburg administrations.