Your Excellency:
Governors of GCC monetary agencies and central banks
Secretary-General of the GCC
Assistant Secretary-General of the GCC
Honorable guests
I am pleased to welcome you in this renewed gathering which brings you together to discuss our banking and financial concerns. I would like at the beginning to praise what your previous meetings have already achieved in terms of largely contributing to the realization of what our GCC counties have long been aspiring for including unifying our legislations and work techniques of our financial institutions, and to the initiation of the hard work to establish GCC monetary unity. I may not be exaggerating if I said that your meeting today in Doha has an additional significance in light of the repercussions of the international financial crisis which has been looming around in the past two years either in the form of changed local and regional economic realities or new directives issued by the international financial regulatory institutions.
Dear brothers,
No doubt you realize the special nature of our GCC economies which are almost entirely dependent on oil and gas exports; and despite what we have achieved up to now in the field of diversifying the sources of income, our returns from oil and gas will remain for years the mainstay of our general expenditure and livelihood. In spite of this solid fact we must confirm the importance of the contribution of other sectors, foremost: banking, insurance and financial services sector, in the gross domestic product in the GCC countries. This sector has been growing steadily in the past decades and was able to achieve outstanding development in its technicalities, products and practices, which had to a great extent helped in safeguarding the position of our banking sector.
The prudent policies adopted by your central banks and the support extended by the governments of the region were to a great extent behind the achievements made in this field.

Dear guests,
Our current success in bypassing the aftermath of the international financial crisis does not absolve us from carefully studying all the details of the crisis so as to draw the lessons and avoid the repetition of what had happened. If the international regulatory institutions have taken it upon themselves to tighten the controls on banking transactions to protect the resources of depositors and shareholders and achieve financial stability in all countries, our central banks in general and their supervisory departments in particular must take the matter seriously enough and move quickly to protect local banks through whatever it takes in terms of procedures and decisions. If no serious work is immune against error, continuing the march successfully requires rectifying such errors and reversing their effects in the right time. This is why we are looking forward to your periodic meetings and discussions which are organized and supported by the GCC general secretariat with a view of exploring all that can be useful and applicable in our Gulf region.
Dear brothers,
The march of our countries towards establishing a Gulf monetary union has gone a long way by setting up the Gulf Monetary Council; and, as the dream of having a single gulf currency has become closer to realize I am confident that the aspirations of our peoples for unity will expedite the realization of this dream not only in the four member countries of the Gulf Monetary Council but also for all of the GCC member countries. Once again, I insist that your conference is required in this and the coming sessions to remove the obstacles that prevent from expediting the achievement of the desired goals and from doing your utmost to upgrade our banking systems on a par with their counterparts in the countries with developed economies.
The present condition of our banking system is alright; and we hope it continues to be so in the future. As for our aspirations, they are limitless in light of the aspirations of our leaders for a prosperous and promising future for our countries and sustainable development for our peoples. You are required to reach the required equilibrium between economic growth rate on the one hand, and financial stability and price control on the other.
To conclude I have the pleasure to welcome you once again and wish you all success in your discussions and pleasant stay in your second country Qatar.