Finance Minister Şimşek holds talks at G20 meet

SAO PAULO

Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek has held a series of talks at the first G20 finance ministers and central bank governors’ meeting of the year in Sau Paulo, Brazil.

“During my bilateral meetings, while evaluating the developments regarding the Turkish economy, we exchanged views on issues that would strengthen our relations and cooperation with multilateral development banks and countries,” Şimşek wrote on the social media platform X.

On Feb. 28, Şimşek met with U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on the sidelines of the G20 summit.

Meanwhile, the meeting of finance ministers from the top 20 economies ended without a joint statement because members were divided over ongoing "geopolitical conflicts," host Brazil said.

"It isn't possible [to reach] a final statement," Finance Minister Fernando Haddad told a news conference on Feb. 29 in Sao Paulo at the closing of the two-day meeting, which was overshadowed by divisions among the group over the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.

"The impasse, as usual, is over the ongoing conflicts," Haddad said, without explicitly mentioning Russia's invasion of Ukraine or Israel's military campaign against Palestinian militant group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

"We had nurtured the hope that more sensitive geopolitical issues could be debated exclusively" by the group's foreign ministers, who held a meeting in Rio de Janeiro last week that was also marred by deep divisions — and likewise failed to produce a joint statement.

Haddad said that on financial issues, the group - which represents 80 percent of the global economy - was unified.

"But since the meeting last week in Rio de Janeiro didn't reach a joint statement, that ended up contaminating the establishment of consensus" at what Brazil had hoped would be a purely economic policy meeting, he said.