Novak: Turkish Stream pipeline becoming more attractive

The company said it has been reducing its exposure to Turkey, as well as Tunisia and Egypt, while increasing sales of holidays to other destinations such as the Canaries, Balearics and mainland Spain.

“Overall, we are now talking about construction of two lines”.

Thus, according to Novak, the role of Turkey as a transit country increases.

The number of foreigners visiting Turkey plummeted by over 40 percent in June.

Ozgur Altug, chief economist at BGC Partners, said: “The recent normalisation with Russian Federation might alleviate the pain in the sector to some extent and could trigger some last-minute reservations to Turkey, but hopes are saved for next year, in our view”.

The Turkish ambassador also informed Pushkov about the latest developments in Turkey and different aspects of Ankara’s relations with Brussels and Washington.

Capacity of one line is around 15.75 billion cubic meters of gas per year.

TurkStat also said that over 2 million of the visitors to the country in the quarter were Turkish citizens resident overseas.

On December 1, 2015 the Russian government suspended the work of the mixed intergovernmental Russian-Turkish commission on trade and economic cooperation, which was headed by Alexander Novak for the Russian side, and which meant to consider the Turkish Stream gas pipeline project. The pipeline is to run 660 km in the old South Stream corridor and 250 km in the new corridor in the direction of the European part of Turkey. The incident led to serious tensions in relations between the two states. After the Russian jet downing last July, both Turkish and Russian officials issued statements about freezing talks on the Turkish Stream project. Then, Head of the Energy Ministry of Russian Federation and Economy Minister of Turkey agreed to set up a working group engaged in the project’s implementation.