Sri Lankan PM to visit Brussels to hold talks on regaining GSP plus

Colombo, Oct 12 (NIA) – Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, will leave for Brussels on Saturday to begin talks on restoring key trade concessions from the EU which were withdrawn from Sri Lanka during the previous regime.

Wickremesinghe told journalists here on Wednesday that Sri Lanka had already filed an application to regain the GSP plus trade concessions and he will hold talks with Brussels during his visit.

State Minister of International Trade, Sujeewa Senasingha told NewsFirst on Wednesday that the government was confident of regaining the GSP plus facility by early next year.

“We have worked hard on it and by beginning of next year we are hoping to receive the GSP plus. There have been no conditions put forward but we had to put some things right,” Senasingha said adding that this included restoring democracy and good governance.

The EU trade concessions was withdrawn from Sri Lanka after Sri Lanka failed to meet certain conditions on human rights issues in 2010 when Mahinda Rajapakse was the president.

However, the new government led by President Maithripala Sirisena, who took office in January last year, has taken measures to meet the expectations of the international community on human rights issues.

The government earlier this year said that it had lost considerable apparel revenue over the past few years as a result of losing the GSP Plus.

According to the Ministry of Commerce, bilateral trade between EU and Sri Lanka exceeded the 5 billion US dollars mark for the first time in 2014 by earning 5.07 billion dollars.

Apparel was the biggest export item in 2014 at 2.16 billion dollars growing by 10.5 percent.