NOVO-OGARYOVO, February 20 (RIA Novosti) - Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday issued an official invitation to the G20 heads of state and government to participate in the St. Petersburg Summit, presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov said.
The G20 Leaders' Summit is due to take place in the fall.
Invitations have also been issued to the so-called outreach countries: Spain, Ethiopia, Senegal, Kazakhstan, Brunei-Darussalam and Singapore, as well as the UN, the World Bank, the IMF, the OEC, the WTO and the ILO.
Russia took over the presidency of the Group of Twenty (G20) of the world’s largest economies in December 2012. The Russian government allocated $1 million from the federal budget for G20 summit-related events.
The first meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank heads this year took place in Moscow on February 15 and 16.
The G20 began inviting non-member countries to its summits since the first summit in 2008. Only Spain, which is a "permanently invited" country, participated in all summits to date.
At the Seoul summit in 2010, G20 leaders agreed on a set of principles for non-member invitations to summits, including that no more than five non-member countries will be invited, of which at least two will be African countries.
