LAHORE, Feb 21: The US businessmen are expected to start visiting Pakistan to explore business opportunities and potential in the next few months.

This was stated by senior commercial officer in the US embassy David Hunter during a visit of an American delegation to the Lahore Chamber of Commerce & Industry here on Thursday.

In his remarks, LCCI president Dr Khalid Chowdhry stressed the need for improving the country perception of Pakistan in order to attract foreign investment badly needed to kickstart the economy.

In response to a question, Hunter urged the businessmen to ask their government to organize business trips to the United States to change the negative perception prevailing among foreign investors about Pakistan. He said such trips could help to a great extent remove the negative image about the country.

To another question, he said, the US was prepared to supply textile machinery to Pakistan’s textile industry to allow it a competitive edge in the textiles on a global level.

Earlier, US EXIM Bank vice president Michael Petrucelli said the purpose of their visit was to follow up President George W Bush’s commitment to Pakistan regarding expansion of political and economical ties. He said the American people were grateful to the people of Pakistan for supporting their war on terrorism.

He stated that a number of American companies interested in business with Pakistan had approached the bank to seek its help to know the “actual” state of affairs here. He said the delegation would try its best to dispel the negative perception of Pakistan in the American businessmen because there was a huge gap between the reality and the perception.

OPIC vice president of external affairs Christopher Coughlin and a representative of the US Trade Development Agency also spoke on the occasion.

The function was, however, marred by the time taken by an unnecessarily long and mostly irrelevant speech made by the LCCI president. Except for a couple of participants, most of them asked unintelligent, very long and irrelevant questions. One of the very senior LCCI member actually requested the US delegates to “enlighten him as to how the profession of banking had begun,” to which the EXIM Bank official had to politely remind him that it was “beyond the scope of the discussion.”