SEOUL, August 07 (AJP) - Uzbekistan will hold its annual open dialogue between President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and entrepreneurs in late August, the Uzbek Embassy in Seoul said on Friday, with no date yet fixed three weeks out.
Nearly 6,000 inquiries have reached the organizing commission's call centers and official bots since intake opened, according to material the embassy distributed. More than 4,200 were resolved, and roughly 1,800 remain under review. Expert groups are working through 300 problems classified as systemic.
Business ombudsman Abdumannop Buriev, appointed in December and facing his first dialogue in the post, said the office is trying to catch problems earlier.
"We focus primary attention on building a preventive system that averts issues before they arise and protects entrepreneurs' rights early on," Buriev said in the embassy statement.
The largest clusters of inquiries concern legal protection for entrepreneurs, with more than 940, and banking, with more than 910. Allocation of production space drew more than 750, and simplification of business regulation nearly 680. Kashkadarya region, Tashkent city, Samarkand region and Fergana region generated the highest volumes.
Away from the call center, government bodies have held more than 750 meetings with over 8,800 entrepreneurs, producing more than 3,500 proposals and complaints. The business ombudsman's office and the Chamber of Commerce and Industry ran a further 130 meetings drawing more than 5,700 entrepreneurs, who raised close to 1,500 issues.
Mirziyoyev held the first of these dialogues on August 20, 2021. Four have followed, all in August, the most recent last year in New Tashkent and the one before that in Nukus.
Measures announced at the meetings have reached the statute book. The 2022 dialogue removed the Chamber of Commerce and Industry from government subordination and abolished criminal liability for violating trade rules. At the 2024 meeting in Nukus, the ceiling on microloans was tripled to 300 million soum, about $25,000, and all banks and microfinance organizations were cleared to lend to small and medium businesses. The president's office says close to a thousand proposals raised at the meetings have been written into legislation.
The machinery around them was formalized by a presidential resolution in May 2024, which created a republican commission to organize the dialogue and regional working groups to handle problems locally. Under that resolution, appeals are taken around the clock from June 15 each year, sorted daily to expert groups and regional teams, and systemic problems are reviewed weekly.
Ahead of last year's dialogue, the call center took more than 13,000 appeals and proposals, the president's office said at the time. That was a final count. Under the 2024 resolution, intake runs until the dialogue itself, and this year's stands at roughly 6,000.
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