KABUL, July 22: Afghan businessmen and emigres are prepared to invest over $500 million in the country immediately, but still have serious concerns about stability and transparency, organizers of an investment conference said on Monday.

“The message we received was clear,” said Dr Susanne Schmeidl of Swisspeace, which helped organize a four-day seminar last week with the Afghan Civil Society Forum.

“The businessmen want a secure environment in which to operate, a transparent environment, but they do have concerns about their future,” she told Reuters.

“Throughout history, people with perfectly innocent links to a government have been later persecuted or punished for those links by succeeding administrations. The same is in Afghanistan.”

Schmeidl said an informal poll of over 200 Afghan businessmen, who attended the seminar showed they had already set aside funds of over $500 million for investment and there was the potential for two to ten times more if conditions were right.

The seminar, which ended on Sunday, attracted the majority of Afghanistan’s leading businessmen, or their representatives, from throughout the country and also from exile in Pakistan, Dubai and elsewhere in the world.

For many, it was their first look at the country under the current interim administration of President Hamid Karzai, but for many the jury was still out on a verdict.

“I am not interested in politics, just in running my business,” said Gulbuddin Ahmadari, who operates a fleet of trucks from Pakistan that delivers perishables to the capital.

“Under the Taliban, our life was made a lot easier because the amounts we had to pay to travel were organised. You knew what it would cost to move a truck from Peshawar to Kabul and how long it would take.

“It is important that we are able to operate like this in the future, but there are signs of confusion along the way. People in the provinces are far removed from the government, and the message needs to get across the country that there is a new way of doing things.”

Karzai has brought regional warlords and powerbrokers into his cabinet in an effort to forge a multi-ethnic government of national unity, but old hostilities remain. Centralizing revenue collection is one of the biggest tasks facing the treasury.

Over 23 years of occupation and conflict have left Afghanistan’s economy in tatters, and although the international community has pledged hundreds of millions in development and reconstruction aid, the government is still struggling to raise the money to run the country and pay public sector workers.

The treasury expects to collect less than $90 million in revenues in the year to March 2003 and finance ministry officials admit over twice that amount will never make its way to Kabul.

Yet while he needs funds to run the government, Karzai is also aware he has to allow as hassle-free a business environment as possible in order to encourage Afghans to invest.

Opening the seminar last week, Karzai said the country would never attract foreign investment unless Afghans themselves led the way. But how far the government is prepared to go to listen to businessmen remains to be seen.

A move by participants at the seminar to appoint a commission to oversee the work of certain ministries was abandoned after it became clear the government was hostile to such an approach.

“They are still finding their feet and don’t want to feel as if every move is being watched,” said one conference insider.—Reuters