British Prime Minister David Cameron met with Wall Street CEOs to press the case for doing business in the United Kingdom and later had “a meeting of minds” with the UN secretary-general on global challenges ranging from Afghanistan to Mideast peace.
On his first official visit to New York City, Cameron also rubbed elbows on Wednesday with media and political elites at a welcome dinner hosted by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The closed meeting with Wall Street CEOs included top executives at JPMorgan Chase & Co, Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Citigroup Inc and Morgan Stanley. The British consulate said the discussions focused on prospects for more trade and investment with the United Kingdom.
Cameron, who took office 10 weeks ago, went to UN headquarters in the early evening for his first meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who returned earlier in the day from Kabul, where he was co-chairman of an international conference on Afghanistan’s future. At Tuesday’s conference, foreign ministers and diplomats from the US and 60 other countries endorsed Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s plan for Afghan police and soldiers to take charge of security nationwide by 2014.
“We had a very successful conference in Kabul,” Ban told Cameron as they posed for pictures before sitting down for talks that a British spokesman described as “a meeting of minds on the full range of current global challenges.”
The two leaders “agreed that the current strategy in Afghanistan was right, and that a political surge was an essential part of the next phase of the campaign,” said the spokesman, who by custom is not named.
The British leader and the UN chief also urged Israel and the Palestinians to move from US-mediated indirect talks to direct peace talks and agreed on the need for “a concerted international effort to deliver a diplomatic solution on the Iran nuclear issue” and the “vital opportunity” at a UN summit in September “to get the world back on track” to meet UN goals to combat poverty, the spokesman said.
Cameron arrived in New York on Wednesday afternoon after a visit to Washington, where he met with US President Barack Obama and discussed the war in Afghanistan at the Pentagon with US officials, including Deputy Defense Secretary William Lynn.
Cameron was greeted in New York by Bloomberg at a street corner just after he arrived. The pair grabbed hot dogs from a street vendor but ignored questions from reporters while they ate.
He and Bloomberg wrapped up the day with another meal together — a more refined private dinner at the Upper East Side headquarters of the billionaire mayor’s philanthropic foundation.
Cameron had hoped his first US visit as prime minister would focus on trade and troop involvement in Afghanistan, but it has been overshadowed by questions of whether BP swayed Scotland’s decision to release the Lockerbie bomber.
Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted for the 1988 bombing of a Pan Am jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, that killed 270 people, most of them American. Last year the Scottish government released the cancer-stricken al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds.
The matter has received new attention because of accusations that BP helped influence the release of al-Megrahi as part of efforts to seek access to Libyan oil fields.
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