23rd December 2011
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
I was fortunate recently to attend my first ever Parsi wedding. Two of the 40 or so Parsi staff in the Deputy High Commission in Mumbai, Nazneen (our press officer) and Burzin ( a member of the UKBA team), were getting married, and they had been kind enough to invite my wife and me to […]
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19th December 2011
Bucharest, Romania
It has been a longstanding personal goal to learn to give first aid and this has eventually come to fruition with support from a local NGO Asociatia React and enthusiastic volunteers at SMURD Bucharest, the special unit within the municipal fire brigade. I was very pleased to hear that SMURD, an almost iconic institution with […]
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15th December 2011
Bucharest, Romania
I spent a couple of days with my colleagues at the British Embassy in Poland during the visit of Lord Green, Minister for Trade and Investment, to discuss commercial opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe and also to launch the “Emerging Europe” brand. With Poland and Romania the 6th and the 7th largest countries in […]
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22nd November 2011
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
Mumbai is the centre of India’s film industry, where hundreds of “Bollywood” movies are produced every year. Shortly before the major Indian festival of Diwali one of the most expensive and extravagant films produced here, “Ra One”, hit the screens both in India and London. Reportedly costing over $30M the film is produced by, and […]
Read more on “Land.Gold.Women” – not your usual Bollywood drama: an honour killing in leafy English suburbia | Reply (1)
11th October 2011
Bucharest, Romania
Guest blogger: Colonel Giles Orpen-Smellie, the British Defence Attaché, on his contribution to the visit by the NATO Parliamentary Assembly to Bucharest It was a pleasure to be able to address the British Parliamentary delegation, led by Sir Menzies Campbell MP, a former leader of the British Liberal-Democrat Party, who visited Bucharest over the weekend […]
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2nd September 2011
Bucharest, Romania
I was in London last week for a packed one-day training to understand how the Foreign Office supports the overall work of the British Government to take forward the growth and prosperity agenda. Commercial diplomacy is a newly coined concept yet diplomats have always been looking out for business potential in their host countries, whether […]
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2nd September 2011
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
A dozen TV cameras zoom in on a pen and an inch-thick contract. Signatures are completed; contracts swapped; and more signatures added. Eventually the process is complete and there are handshakes and a round of applause. I am at the Ukrainian Ministry of Energy to witness the signing of an important Joint Activity Agreement between […]
Read more on Increasing Ukrainian gas production | Reply
27th June 2011
Bucharest, Romania
European leaders meeting in Brussels last week agreed that the regulatory burden on SMEs needs to be further reduced, something that the UK has very strongly argued for in its agenda for growth. The European Commission will therefore undertake to assess the impact of future regulations on micro enterprises and to screen the acquis to […]
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16th June 2011
Bucharest, Romania
As economic recovery and competitiveness are at the heart of the European agenda, the British Embassy plans to run a media training programme on this heavyweight issue in the autumn. The idea is to bring a senior British business journalist to Romania to share from his/her experience in reporting and commenting about the challenges and […]
Read more on Meet a Brit – media training coming soon | Reply
8th June 2011
This post was published when the author was in a previous role
Jamnagar is not one of the most well-known towns in India. For many years it must have been a small settlement surrounded by semi -arid scrubland, existing mainly as a trading place and a stop for travellers around what is now Gujarat state, and with a number of well-preserved 16th century Jain temples. Nestled in […]
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