Press Release

Austrian Museum of Fine Arts Friends visit OFID

36/2006 May 9, 2006, Vienna, Austria
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The OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID) today and yesterday welcomed visiting groups of the association of Friends of the [Austrian] Museum of Fine Arts, who called at OFID for a working tour of the building and a brief lecture on the aims and record of the institution.

The groups were received on behalf of the Director-General, Mr. Suleiman Jasir Al-Herbish, by Mr. Alvaro Benavides La Grecca, Director of the Department of Information.

In the lecture to both groups, Mr. Sam Ifeagwu, Senior Officer, focused on the lending and grants operations of OFID as well as on the private sector facility. He said that OFID concerns itself mainly with the social and economic welfare of the poorer countries of the world; in particular, the least developed. “ OFID, over a period of thirty years, has been building infrastructure, battling poverty, pursuing research and working toward accomplishments which now officially go by the designation “Millennium Development Goals.” Thus far, Mr. Ifeagwu told his listeners, OFID has a presence in 120 countries, worldwide, and has delivered some US$7.9 billion in financing to these countries.

Mrs. Jeanette Koller of the association and who lead the groups explained to the visitors that the OFID headquarters (Palais Deutschmeister) was built between the years 1864-1868, to the architectural design of Theophil Hansen and was the residential palace of Austrian Archduke Wilhelm Franz Karl. Later on it served the German Order of Knights. The OFID purchased the building in 1981, moving in after renovations in December 1982. The building has been declared a national monument by the Austrian Authorities.