President of Russia Dmitry Medvedev: I am glad to see you, Mr Zoellick.
You and I meet regularly at various international forums to discuss the situation in the global economy. Looking at the way thing are today, we feel a little better than we did a year ago, when the G20 was discussing what to do. But of course there are still problems that need to be solved. We still have to do an immense amount of work to improve the architecture of international financial institutions.
We have already made some decisions in this area, some very important decisions, including those relating to quotas. But the process does not end there: we have to work towards improving corporate governance, we have to work on international standards — in short, we have to go on with what we have been doing recently.
Not all countries are in the same situation: some have emerged more quickly from the crisis, others are in more difficult situations. I just met with the Greek Prime Minister [George Papandreou] and advised him to apply to the IMF and the World Bank in order to resolve Greece’s problems.
World Bank President Robert Zoellick: I asked Mr Kudrin [Russian Finance Minister] whether he was going to be seeing the Greek Prime Minister. You never know who is going to be asked for money.
Dmitry Medvedev: But generally speaking I hope that we are now going to talk about how things stand now. So I welcome you.
Robert Zoellick: Well, I also want to thank you because as you know the primary reason that I came was because of the conference that Deputy Prime Minister Kudrin is hosting on new partnerships in global development finance. And I very much appreciate his leadership in this.
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