G-7 Meet Over Russian Crisis
FINANCE
The News
M‚xico City, September 6, 1998.
By JEFF BROOKS
Bloomberg News
LONDON -- A spokesman for British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Saturday that
representatives from the Group of Seven (G-7) industrial nations will meet in London to ''discuss
the international community's response'' to Russia's economic crisis. Blair is the present chairman
of G-7.
No date has been set for the meeting, though it will ''very probably'' take place next week, the
spokesman said. The meeting will be chaired by Nigel Wicks, a Deputy Permanent Secretary
from the U.K. Treasury, and will include senior officials from G-7 Finance Ministries and
Foreign Ministries from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank and the
European Commission, the spokesman said.
The decision to hold the meeting was taken at a meeting of Blair and U.S. President Bill Clinton
in Northern Ireland on Thursday afternoon, at which Clinton briefed Blair on the situation in
Russia after his visit there, the spokesman said.
A statement by Foreign Ministers at the European Union summit in Salzburg, Austria said Russia
would not receive aid from the west, the British Broadcasting Corporation reported.
Previous announcements by German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and President Clinton poured cold
water on any hopes Russia might have that G-7 nations were planning to bail it out of its
continuing economic crisis.
Kohl had ruled out an emergency G-7 summit to deal with Russia's financial woes as long as it's
not clear who's in charge of the world's No. 2 nuclear weapons arsenal.
[FINANCE]
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