Financial Times: I’d like to start, if I may, with the accession negotiations and where they’ve got to. I know that [European Commission President José Manuel] Barroso and [EU enlargement commissioner Olli] Rehn were in Ankara last week, so I’ve been very interested to find out what they were saying and what you said to them, and where you think this stands.

Ali Babacan: Since the end of 2004 Turkey is not just a candidate country for the EU but we are a negotiating country and accession country. And, in order to get that status, in 2003 and 2004 we made many reforms to meet the Copenhagen criteria sufficiently. That was only possible when we did the amount of reforms which were necessary to exceed the critical threshold, so to say which we did. It was October 2005 when we had our negotiations framework document accepted by the EU member states and Turkey so that our negotiations formerly started. Now we are in a process, this is a process which will last many years which will continue until Turkey becomes a full member of the European Union.