UK firms press for Iraqi contracts

SOME of Britain's biggest engineering firms will tomorrow meet an Iraqi delegation led by the country's only female Cabinet minister in a concerted bid to push their case for reconstruction work.

Weir Group, Costain and Halcrow are among 10 companies and organisations that plan talks with Nasreem Berwari, the Minister for Municipalities and Public Works, in London.

Insiders at Government-funded trade body UK Trade & Investment hope the visits will take some pressure off Foreign Office Minister Mike O'Brien over the lack of British success in winning reconstruction deals.

The group has also set up an eight-day visit by some of Iraq's leading academic lights in a bid to revive the export of education material to the oil-rich country.

A 12- strong delegation including Saad Bashir Eskander, director general of Iraq's National Library and Archives, will meet MacMillan Education, Blackwell Publishing and Oxford University Press.

The largest reconstruction deals so far have almost exclusively gone to US oil and construction giants Halliburton and Bechtel with British firms left to root around for scraps as subcontractors.