UK-Africa Investment Summit 2020
Tunisia – Open for business
Interview
Beligh Ben Soltane, president of the Tunisian Investment Authority, explains the role of the organisation in the mobilisation of investment in Tunisia and what he expects from the UK-Africa Investment Summit
The focus is on an investorcentered approach What is the role of the TIA ? The Tunisian Investment Authority (TIA) is a public institution with a private management mode. Its role is to attract and facilitate investments in Tunisia. Our talented investor services managers mentor, accompany and assist local and international investors at every stage of the investment process in all sectors. To put it simply, our role is to help Tunisian and foreign investors set up in Tunisia and above all to help them develop their reinvestment operations. For this, the investor needs a partner/facilitator with wide-ranging, effective powers who can lighten the procedures and facilitate the steps necessary for the creation of projects. What role does the TIA play in supporting investors? The TIA has successfully launched a major support and modernisation project for the digitalisation of investor services. The goal is to improve the efficiency of administrative procedures related to investments, reduce processing times and simplify the registration and creation of projects. In Tunisia, everyone is aware of the practical importance of digital in the decision-making and development process. It is for this reason that we at
Our role is to help Tunisian and foreign investors set up in Tunisia and above all to help them develop their reinvestment operations
the TIA now consider digitalisation a philosophy, a state of mind and an irreversible process. For example, today, investors can go to our website, create an account and request all the services that the TIA offers. The TIA teams act as advisers, as we are the partner of choice for investors. As a result, reliable, practical information is provided that helps decision-making. And that’s not all. The TIA is involved in all phases of the project, speeding up the process of obtaining authorisations if the investor needs them. Sometimes, even if the administration is silent, the TIA is called upon to respond to the needs of its customers. All this means that today investors can count on us, because we share with them the objective of making a success of their project whatever its nature (creation or growth), whether they are Tunisian or foreign. What have been your flagship initiatives? I would mention four: harmonising and simplifying procedures; digitisation of services for Tunisian and foreign investors; efforts to grant authorisations; and the realisation, during our first year, of 33 declared investment operations of 2.3bn Tunisian dinars, which will create more than 14,000 jobs. How can the TIA use the opportunity provided by the UKAfrica Investment Summit to attract British and African investors to Tunisia? Our participation in the UK-Africa Investment Summit is aimed at raising the profile of the priority sectors in Tunisia, where we can do business. We intend to seize this opportunity to make our British partners more of the facilitation role that the TIA plays across the entire investment value chain and get them to study the various business opportunities that Tunisia offers in the context of PPP projects or in the form of foreign direct investment. To this must be added the opportunities that Brexit represents. As a prelude to this, Tunisia and the UK signed an association agreement in 2019 to further boost trade and investment between our two countries. Tunisia’s location in the southern Mediterranean gives it an undeniable advantage as a regional platform that can also serve as a gateway to markets in sub-Saharan Africa. n