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Hello and welcome to World Business Report from the BBC World Service.
I'm Roger Hearing and on this edition, the US lifts sanctions on Syria after President Trump met the Syrian interim leader in Riyadh.
So will this revive the country's economy after 14 years of war?
Also today, optimism from one Chinese exporter over the reduced tariffs agreed between Beijing and Washington.
It's not 145%, 10%.
The future will be bright.
Plus fears about conditions for foreign workers as Saudi Arabia builds facilities for the 2034 World Cup and the strange tale of the missing texts between the head of the European Commission and the boss of one of the world's largest pharmaceutical firms. But first, Syria has been under some form of sanctions by the United States for more than 14 years, and they've been pretty comprehensive, an embargo on the oil sector, a freeze on state assets and a total ban on the import to Syria of goods and services from the US.
But now that's over.
President Trump made the announcement before meeting the Syrian transitional president Ahmed El -Shara during his visit to Saudi Arabia.
He said he wanted to give Syria, which emerged from a long -running civil war in December, a chance for greatness.
The announcement prompted immediate celebrations on the streets of the capital, Damascus.
The feeling is indescribable, unbelievable happiness.
Hopefully God helps this country and it will be better for everyone.
Congratulations to everyone.
There is incredible happiness for all Syrians It will be great for our country Construction will return, the refugees will return Everyone will return, the prices will drop.
There is good to come, God willing.
It just needs a bit of patience.
But good things are coming our way.
Joy on the streets of Damascus.
But one of the people who'll be trying to benefit from the easing of sanctions is Anas Tarabolsi.
Now he's the owner of a garment factory in Damascus, and he told me about his hopes.
I want to tell you something.
Talking about the new Syria after the sanctions is about a country that will be closer to the surrounding world, so we can export our products from Syria to all over the world.
Because after 2011 we can't export anything to the European countries or any American countries because of the sanctions.
For example, transferring the money from the suppliers to the factories was impossible.
So it'll be easier now.
It will be very good for your business then?
Yes, of course, it's going very better for us.
And are you able to make things in your factory now?
Can you work? Do you have the means to make things?
Yes, of course, we are preparing our factories to make new orders to Europe countries.
I have rebuilt the new factory 6 ,000 meters square to make all kinds of socks, underwear.
and we are renewed our old machines by ordering some spare parts by the euro countries because you know we have in our factory some machines from Europe from Italy from Germany and after 2011 we can't get any spare parts to fix our machines because of the sanctions.
But for now I can call the company of the spare parts, say I'm in Syria and we need some spare parts for our machines and they can send it, export it to us and we can transfer the money to them, so it will be really better for us to make our new business with the Europe countries or American countries.
And Anas, I'm sure you'll be able to have more jobs for people in Syria to come and work at your factory.
Yes, yes, when we are talking about 6 ,000 meters square.
That means we need new workers and we need new persons to work.
So I think it will be better for the people that travel to the Europe countries before the war.
I think it's a good time to get back to Syria and working here.
We need more workers.
We need more peoples to help us to stand up again in Syria.
And do you think it will be now peace in Syria?
Because if you are making a factory and you're trying to do business, you need peace.
Yes of course, when you need to make any business in any country all over the world, first of all you need peace, first of all.
And you have that now in Syria?
It's more better than before.
You can go bigger because you feel that I'm not safe to be bigger in our factory, in our business.
But for now, no, it's very clear to make your factory bigger, to make a new business, to make bigger business.
It's very easy for us.
And that was Anas Tabulsi speaking to me from Damascus.
But are investors going to flock to put their money into Syria, particularly given the disasters of recent history.
Well joining me now is Said Barker, who's a Research Associate in Political Economy at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington at the moment.
Said, thanks for being with us I suppose the first a question in all this is is it is it going to be free now for virtually everyone are all the sanctions do you think not just by the United States but the Europeans and others are they all gonna come off hello hello yeah thank you for having me to answer your question, I think sanctions will be moved gradually.
The thing about U .S. sanctions is that while the president can remove some of them through executive order, there will need to be an approval from Congress for some particular sanctions, particularly the sanctions that were imposed under the Caesar Act in 2019.
So, I do anticipate that the removal of sanctions will happen gradually.
It's still unclear what the timeline would be.
But I'm anticipating to see more news headline about that here and here and here in Washington as Trump finalizes his visit within the Gulf.
And what about outsiders then coming in with money putting money into Syria to build things like that factory we were hearing about our investors likely to flock in do you think?
Yeah I believe that investors will comment also a cautiously and gradually I anticipate regional actors in the region, like investors from Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE to be more eager to test the water first. And that's due to a combination of political and economic motives.
Depending on how fast sanctions are removed as well as the type of sanctions that will be lifted in near future, I do anticipate the following sectors, like to have significant interest which I believe they're going to be related to the sectors of energy, construction and banking.
As far as global investors I think that the Russians and Chinese will have like will show a lot of interest investing in Syria's future.
However, the new Syrian government has signaled on multiple occasions lately that they are giving a priority to American and other western companies.
And, Said, I suppose a lot also depends on there being no more trouble, no more attacks, no more killings of civilians, that kind of thing.
Absolutely. Yeah. Which is why I believe that Western investors are going to be more cautious to invest right away.
I think they need assurance, like as far as you have mentioned.
Political stability and enhancing laws related to capital and property rights.
They need guarantees really to make it work, don't they?
Said, thank you so much for being with us.
Said Bachar, there, of the Arab Gulf States Institute speaking to me there from Washington.
The new phase of China -US trade has begun.
The temporary measures announced on Monday bringing down sky -high tariffs on both sides have come into force.
Beijing and Washington now have 90 days in which to negotiate a more comprehensive deal.
But the wheels of international commerce turned slowly.
So how are exporters dealing with the changes?
Jane Sonney is an exporter who sends out containers from the Chinese manufacturing hub of Yiwu.
she gave me her reaction to the China -US tariff reprieve.
It's good news. Everybody is happy.
I am in China, in my area, because my friends, they stopped the production for three months already, just because of the tax.
Now for us, we can start a new business to continue my production.
But it's only for 90 days.
it must make it difficult to plan to know what's going to happen next.
Yes, it is a big challenge for us.
But we will see already that it's not 145 percent… 10 percent.
The future will be bright, right?
And the people that you are dealing with, they're coming and saying, OK, let's have a go, let's do it again, because the tariffs have changed.
Yes, yes, yes. So we think it is a very big news, very good news.
But it's difficult to react quickly, I guess, because people need to work these things out in advance.
Have they said right now yes, let's go ahead?
Or are they waiting to see?
No, we already start.
Because from America, China to America, if I am the shipper to America, I will immediately ship it out as soon as possible.
But it takes a long time to go across the Pacific doesn't it?
And if it takes a long time you have to have to get around that?
I think at the end of 19 days maybe have something changed but it is not worse than before April or May.
Government already talked!
Jane Sunnie there speaking to me from Yivu but the logistics of the global supply chain a complex and also slow moving how do you make sure the ships you need are in the right place?
And how can you plan exports under tariffs that are only guaranteed for the next three months?
I've been speaking to Craig Morin.
He's a partner at the YCP consulting firm in Hong Kong.
I think the first thing is that all my friends and colleagues in global sourcing have basically taken a big breath of relief because they've been scrambling to reconfigure a lot of their sourcing arrangements due to the uncertainty of what would be the final tariff and how much and how do they get the peak shipments for back to school, Halloween, Christmas, into the US at a reasonable price.
So trade volumes to the US had plummeted over April and earlier in the month and now they're going to skyrocket for the next three months as people try to get all of the products that they can into the markets in that 90 -day window while they figure out their plans for really post that 90 day window.
Yeah because it's quite hard to do that I mean this is a massive area and trying to get something from nothing back up to where it was in a short time that's a huge ask isn't it?
Yes I mean the shippers have huge amounts of uncertainty, whether or not your sea freight or air freight, they're going to make hay as the sun shines over the next three months.
And then after that, they'll be looking at how do they reconfigure their trade routes moving forward?
Because, you know, the bilateral trade will likely continue to diminish, you know, as people are concerned about uncertainty going forward. And so folks will continue to ship production to Southeast Asia and elsewhere.
And so instead of Shanghai and Shenzhen to the US, you'll have more circular routes, you know, picking up more cargo from Vietnam, Indonesia, etc. But also on the on the backwards lanes, if Trump can get more cargo coming back, then that's great for the shippers and, you know, reduces their empty cargo that they that a lot of them had had previously.
But a lot of that will also shift to Brazil and elsewhere.
And so the shippers will need to figure out how to reconfigure their routes to say, OK, well, maybe it's instead of US, China, it's Southeast Asia, China, U .S., South America, and then back.
Yeah, because I mean, I imagine that a lot of the ships are in the wrong place now, just by the nature of how this all happened, and to actually get back into the ships being the right place to take things the right direction.
That might take some time.
Exactly, it won't be quick.
They will move as quickly as they can in order as I said to profit off of this 90 -day period.
But shipping prices will be elevated for the foreseeable future just due to the uncertainty and how do you understand and how do you ensure that you have fill rates that you had previously.
So you think there will be something structural in this that actually people will look and actually given the uncertainty going forward even after the this period of 90 days for our longer -term business position we should probably be thinking about doing something other than shipping between China and the US yes exactly with uncertainty it just adds risk and so people will price that in and so that will be factored in for whether or not your retailer rather not your ship bean company whether or not you're a manufacturer and to be very blunt I mean that the manufacturing ecosystem in China was very
well established and it's still the lowest cost point of origin for most items, and so when people say all right well I have to move some of that just to mitigate risks there will be increased cost on the manufacturing side and by creating uncertainty and having more points of origin it'll be on the the shipping side as well.
Greg Morin there speaking to be from Hong Kong.
Well let's pick up some of this with Russ Mould, Investment Director at AJ Bell who joins me now.
Russ thanks for being with us here on World Business Report once again.
So let's pick up on that because there's been, there's talk about a sort of bounce coming out of those China -US talks the relief that at least for 30 for 90 days I should say there will be a relaxation in some of the tariffs but that's sort of paired a bit from what I've been seeing from Wall Street this morning yeah the markets are reassessing in the end tariffs are still going to be a lot higher in 90 days time than they were before the 2nd of April and I think that's the realization you could argue that President Trump may look may feel pretty smart in that he's being perhaps able to impose
30 % tariffs on China and how people decide that's a good deal so he may feel pretty pleased with that But in the end, financial markets will start looking at the long term implications for those higher tariffs, and the short term implications for pricing.
And also, again, that issue that we've just heard there about supply chains, and if they are indeed moved and production is on short, continuing the process that we probably saw post COVID when supply chains first came under pressure.
That again, could mean higher costs because in the end, greatest is that they get employment people in Birmingham, Alabama and more expensive than those from employment Beijing.
Yeah. And taking our focus off the Beijing - Washington axis for a moment, looking at Tokyo.
It's not been a great little time for the Japanese economy recently, not terribly impressive earnings, Sony, Panasonic, Toyota, Nissan, all looking a bit, well, as if maybe it's the currency issue, but they're not doing well.
No, the currency issue is definitely a huge one, because the yen had advanced sharply and that made Japanese exports less competitive.
Also, but what you are seeing, these companies are responding.
you know, Panasonic is talking about cutting 10 ,000 jobs and Nissan is talking about cutting 11 ,000 jobs and closing factories.
So they're trying to again, adapt to this tariff world that they're that these types may or may not may not come.
They're a big challenge for all of them.
And the company's are responding accordingly with cost cuts and efficiency programmes.
Yeah, difficult times.
Russ, thanks so much for being with us.
Russ Mould there. Joining me on the line, investment director at AJ Bell.
And just a reminder that you're with World Business Report on the BBC World.
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Find your CFP professional at Let's Make a Plan .org Now, the Football World Cup is going to be in Saudi Arabia in 2034, and preparations are already under way, but there are concerns about those who will be building the facilities.
Human rights watchers accuse global football's governing body, FIFA, of failing to learn from the last World Cup in Qatar, and warned of a potential surge in the deaths of foreign workers.
They have urged the Saudi authorities to enforce basic safety standards, pointed to dozens of avoidable accidents on building projects in recent years.
Saudi officials haven't commented and FIFA says it's going to set up a worker welfare system.
I've been speaking to Jeffery Oteyena.
He's a Kenyan human rights advocate working with the human rights and labour organisation Equidem.
He was a migrant worker himself in Qatar working on several stadiums that were built for the World Cup.
I'm very worried because the problems I have many, one is heat stress.
The humidity levels go up to a high of 74 and above.
and you know how strenuous the work of building stadiums is.
Working at height, working in confined spaces.
The second one is the tendency of hiding these incidences and the reporting death tolls.
The numbers that were given out by the civil society are more than what the Qatar government itself accepted.
Then workers working without personal protective equipment is a big, big challenge.
Then discrimination against migrant workers in accessing and using health care facilities.
They are health care facilities that are for citizens alone.
That is discrimination of the highest order at this age of the world.
So Geoffrey, let me just clarify that.
So what you're saying is that FIFA should put it to the Saudi authorities that they need to change their practices.
If for example, health was properly covered, if they had proper protective clothing, if consideration was given to the difficulties of building in great heat, that would be okay.
As long as those things were taken on board you would be happy.
I would be at least happy because that is a mitigation point.
This is a big opportunity especially for countries.
For example I will speak like for my country Kenya, whereby labor migration is a big drive of the economy.
We would look at the economic part of it rather than looking at the protection guarantees part of it.
So for me, if they can put those mitigation factors in place and they are implemented to the latter, it will reduce the distress calls we get from workers, the deaths, the injuries that workers get.
This should be a precondition for you to host such a magnitude of an event.
That should be a precondition.
And there's time for that because this isn't happening until 2034.
I mean that's that's nine years away these things can be done.
Yeah these things can be done but they can only be done by pressure.
Let FIFA put a precondition that Saudi should open up to all civil rights organizations, inspectors should be given access to these construction sites to go and visit and see what challenges the workers face and workers should not be intimidated not to speak out.
Workers are so scared that they don't want even to speak out because if you speak out the employers will retaliate against you.
And definitely that is deportation back to your country.
And all workers always travel abroad to make money to save their families from poverty.
Geoffrey Otieno there.
Now back in 2022 the world was scrabbling to access vaccines to combat Covid -19 often with the US, UK and the EU competing with each other to get the best deal from the big pharmaceutical companies.
And that time has come under a lot of scrutiny in the efforts to learn lessons for any future pandemic – though it's been claimed some officials are being less than open about what exactly happened.
This has all come under scrutiny in an E .U. court in Luxembourg.
The judges at the General Court have ruled that The New York Times should be able to see text messages sent between the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of Pfizer.
The European Commission said it would closely study the ruling.
Let's speak to Martina Stervis -Grinneff, who's calendar bureau chief of the New York Times previously reported for the paper in Brussels.
Martina, thanks so much for being with us.
First of all, just what is the New York Times trying to do by by seeing these texts?
I think fundamentally we're trying to do two things.
One is, as you just stated, we believe firmly that messages exchanged between two very important people in the procurement of vaccines, the biggest procurement contract in EU history, should be part of public information.
The public should be able to look at these, should be able to understand how its taxpayers' money was spent.
So that is one thing.
The other thing, though, is a broader point about transparency and the freedom of information in the European Union, which has been until this ruling today behind the UK and the United States, in including text messages and other instant messages in its scope of definition for what is a public document.
And the ruling today affirms our case in that.
But some of the case from the other side was that, you know, that even if these text still exist and there's some doubts about that, it might be just, oh, you know, I'll speak to you next Tuesday or, or what's the weather like somewhere?
I mean, not necessarily things that are going to actually give us much extra information.
That's what they have claimed.
and our role and our position in this court case has been to hold them to account as to whether that is true.
They have failed to adequately explain what happened to these messages and their lack of transparency throughout this case, which as you've noted, has been going on for three years, has been not particularly encouraging in our confidence that they are being truthful about how well they have managed what should in our opinion and in the court's opinion be public information.
So if in the end they do hand them over and it's just procedural stuff, you'll spend a lot of money finding absolutely nothing?
Well actually the court ruled that the Commission needs to pay for our lawyers and we are very privileged and we take that privilege very seriously to have the resources to pursue this case in the European courts, noting that we're an American news organization.
However the point here stands.
We have set with this case precedent that in the European Union text messages and other instant messages are not going to escape public scrutiny just because they're quote unquote instant.
The authorities cannot avoid being scrutinized and being subject to transparency rules just because technology is moving on and officials and people in power cannot simply avoid scrutiny by switching from email or, you know, remember fax to text messages.
And we think this has been well worth the fight.
So what happens next?
I mean, this court was found in your favor, but it's not it's not a slam dunk now.
it's actually got to go further, hasn't it?
It does have to go further.
First of all, we need to learn whether the Commission intends to appeal this decision, which is within its rights.
It can appeal to the European Court of Justice, which is the highest court in the European Union.
And then we need to see how the European Commission responds practically to what the Court has ordered.
We were watching it very closely, but we feel very gratified today to have pursued this case for three years in front of the European courts.
We think it's really really important and it is being hailed by transparency advocates as a landmark ruling for the European Union.
Isn't there another case though to say, Martina, that there's a kind of chilling effect perhaps of this kind of scrutiny, and this case was made I know during certain issues in the UK in terms of giving out messages.
That in the end, if politicians have to think all the time, oh how is this going to look three years down the line when someone digs up something that I've said in a you know perhaps jocula or a message to someone else that's going to stop them behaving as they perhaps might more reasonably do in any casual manner because scrutiny can be very unforgiving.
Well spending billions of dollars or euros or pounds on behalf of taxpayers in an intransparent manner shouldn't be a casual matter, it should be taken extremely seriously and I think this is what this court case is about.
It's not about stripping the executive of its leeway in exercising its power to make good decisions.
It's about being able to be held accountable.
I want to remind you and your listeners that we still don't know the terms of those vaccine contracts that the European Union signed with Pfizer and other pharmaceuticals, we don't know how much European Union taxpayers paid for it.
So we do think this is really significant.
Maybe it will come out.
Martina, thank you so much for being with us there.
Martina Stewis of the New York Times.
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