The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has issued the following statement:
Lead Negotiator for ASEAN - Australia/NZ FTA
Following the announcement of Martin Harvey as New Zealand’s incoming High Commissioner to Singapore, Vangelis Vitalis has been appointed as the new Lead Negotiator for the ongoing ASEAN–Australia/New Zealand Free Trade Agreement (AANZFTA).
An economics and politics graduate of Auckland and Harvard Universities, Vangelis brings to the position a wealth of international economic experience.
Alongside his MFAT experience, Vangelis has worked for the Secretariat of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as well as working with the Russian Ministry of Agriculture and the Ministries of Finance in Tashkent (Uzbekistan) and Ashgabad (Turkmenistan) on currency reform and technical aspects of their WTO accession applications.
More recently, Vangelis has been New Zealand’s senior negotiator on a range of WTO-related issues including rules, environment and development. He has also been the senior negotiator on investment, labour and environment in New Zealand’s ongoing FTA negotiations, including with its partners in the Trans-Pacific Economic Partnership, China and for the AANZFTA.
This fellow has an extremely good reputation and it is good to see that there will be some continuity in this negotiating team. However, The Hive team were surprised to read that Vitalis was a Harvard Graduate. We had been under the impression that he was an LSE man (ie an even more left leaning institution).
