General Assembly  on April 8, 2021

General Assembly  on April 8, 2021

 Annual General Assembly on April 8, 2021 was the first offline event of the Chamber within the last  year.   The aim of the event was to  report on the activities in 2020 and elect AmCham  Board of Directors for 2021.

Despite COVID-19 situation in Uzbekistan, the Chamber organized over 60 online events with participation of leading government ministries and agencies. The speakers  included Senator Safaev,  Dilshod Sultanov, Deputy Minister of Finance, Ulugbek  Azamov, Deputy Chairman, State Committee of Tourism, Dilmurod Kasimov, Director of  Business Ombudsman, Laziz Kudratov, Deputy Minister,   the Ministry of Investment and Foreign Trade and representatives of  ADB, the WB, EBRD, and IMF.

Indeed, the policy  dialogue  was  signific ally improved in 2021.   Thus, Platinum members  discussed trade and investment bottlenecks with Sir Suma Chakrabarti, Advisor to  the President of Uzbekistan on economic issues.  As the result, the feed-back  would be added to  the country strategy  2022-2025 . The Executive Team was actively advocating individual  cases of Platinum and Gold members directly with MIFT and Senate

However, the most  successful  policy dialogue was reached via extensive system of 11 AmCham  Committees.  Chairs of AmCham committees reported on the activity in 2020 and shared their plans for 2021. The most successful of those are:

HR Committee representatives (2) joined the Senate ( Oliy Majlis) group for Draft  New Labor Code

Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Committee raised over 15 policy  issues and  joined the working groups in the Ministry of Health,  the Ministry of Finance, UzStandart,  the Agency  for Ecology

Tax and Accounting Committee – Reform on the administration of the VAT- working group meeting with  the Republican Tax Committee.

The membership was growing in 2020 despite COVID-19 situation. New system of membership  benefits encouraged members to  join as voting . Thus big multinationals like Nestle, P&G, Air Products, Balton Trading, Wings Distribution, Uniliver and others joined in voting categories in 2020.

The event  was concluded by the election of the Board of Directors for 2021.

As a result, 9 BOD members were selected:

• • • •  Shadab Khan, President, Coca-Cola
      •  Igor Kolesnikov, Vice President, UzBAT
      •  Vera Bell, Treasurer, Crowe TAC
      •  Atabek Alimdjanov, Secretary, SGS Group
      • Puneet Tandon ,   Hyatt Regency Tashkent
      • Abdulkhamid Muminov,   PwC
      • Anvar Azamov ,  Ernst & Young
      • Joel Benjamin, Kinstellar LLC
      • Sardor Mukhamadaliev,  UNITEL LLC.
      • Hugo Minderhoud, Senior Advisor to the BOD