Margaret Thatcher pledges to promote free enterprise in Russia and Eastern Europe
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ST. PETERSBURG. Oct 22 (Interfax) – Margaret Thatcher, the former UK prime minister, said she would promote free enterprise in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Entrepreneurs from Central and Eastern Europe opened a forum in St. Petersburg's Tavrichesky Palace on Tuesday. The forum organizers, the St. Petersburg Center for Assistance to UNESCO and the Association of East European and Asian Entrepreneurs, said their goal was to work out a mechanism of effective assistance to entrepreneurs in the USSR and other East European countries.
President Mikhail Gorbachev said in his greeting to the forum that new and exceedingly favorable conditions for mutually beneficial international cooperation had been created in Europe in recent years.
Margaret Thatcher said she would do her best for East European nations to receive the financial assistance, know-how and consultations they had requested from the West. She censured the EEC leadership for its recent statement describing the influx of goods from the former socialist countries into the West European markets as "undesirable."
The forum brings together over 500 delegates of business groups in the ex-Soviet republics, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania.