About 428 of the pardoned prisoners are women.

Lemma Megerssa, the chief administrator of the regional state, said more efforts would be made to broaden the political space in the region.

The regional state granted amnesty to 6, 655 prisoners last September.

Moreover, it pardoned 10,000 inmates in December and 6,430 prisoners in June 2017, it was noted.

Upgrading works carried out over the past few years allowed the country to own a telecom company which meets international standards, said Dr Andualem Admassie, CEO of the company in an exclusive interview with FBC.

He said the expansion and upgrading works that were undertaken over the past 12 years, in particular, played a key role in transforming the telecom company which will turn 125 years old next year.

The government has invested hugely to improve the sector in the reported period, the CEO said, citing the 1.5 billion US dollars spent in 2006 as a case in point.

As a result of this upgrading works, demands for mobile and fixed-line telephone services increased in the country, the CEO indicated.

In order to meet these demands and provide better services for clients, Ethio-telecom outsourced its management to a French company at a cost of 30 million Euro, Dr Andualem said.

During its two and a half years management, the French company improved the administrative, distribution, marketing, sales, communications and network capacity of Ethio-telecom, he indicated.

The country has now a network capacity which could accommodate over 80 million mobile subscribers, he noted.

According to him, the number of mobile and fixed-line telephone subscribers in the country has hit 66.2 million now.

Ethio-telecom recently announced that it has secured 27.79 billion birr in revenues in the first nine months of this Ethiopian fiscal year.

When asked about complaints of clients on high prices of service charges of the telecom sector, the CEO said Ethiopia is one of the countries that have least tariffs in fixed-line telephone service.

However, prices adjustment will be made on mobile data tariffs benchmarking East African and other countries.

Regarding problems of network quality, Dr Andualem blamed the theft in fibre optic as the cause of the problem.

Admasu Nebebe, Ethiopia’s State Minister of Finance and Economic Cooperation and B. Van Loosdrecht, Ambassador of the Netherlands signed the agreement here today.

The grant will be used to finance the public health infrastructure project specifically for the construction of Cardiac Care centre in Addis Ababa, at Black Lion Hospital.

The acquisition of the aircraft makes Ethiopian the first airlines to operate 100 aircraft fleet in the history of the African continent.

On the planned delivery of the aircraft, Ethiopian Group CEO, Tewolde Gebremariam said “It is an immense honour for all of us at Ethiopian to reach the milestone of 100 aircraft.  “This milestone is a continuation of our historical aviation leadership role in Africa and a testimony of the successful implementation of our fast, profitable and sustainable growth plan, Vision 2025,” he added.

Ethiopian was the first to avail jet service in the continent back in 1962 and operated the first African B767 in 1984, the first African B777-200LR in 2010, the first African B787-800 Dreamliner and B777-200 freighter in 2012 and the first African A350 in 2016 and the first African B787-9 aircraft in 2017.

It now operates one of the youngest and most modern 100 aircraft, with an average age of fewer than 5 years. The Airline has 5 more Boeing 787-900 and 16 Airbus A350 airplanes on order.

Ethiopian was the first African Airline and second only to Japan to operate the B787 Dreamliner in 2012 and the first carrier in Africa to usher with the Airbus A350 XWB in 2016.

The Airline commands the lion’s share of the pan-African passenger and cargo network operating fleet to more than 110 international passenger and cargo destinations across five continents.

Ambassador Amin Abdurkadir was sent to Algeria from Riyadh, replacing Ambassador Solomon Abebe, who has been moved to Nigeria from Algiers.

Ambassador Girum Abay has been sent to Brussels, the Baltic States and Benelux countries from Moscow, Russia.

Ambassador Wubshet Demise, a consul general in Jeddah, has been recalled to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Ambassador Girum Abay will take function next month as Ethiopia’s new representative to the EU, Benelux countries and the Baltic States A seasoned diplomat and fluent in Russian; he is currently based in Moscow, where he contributed to further strengthening the longstanding relationship between Russia and Ethiopia.

Last week, the government of Ethiopia announced that it had begun talks with the Front.

The ruling EPRDF coalition announced in January 2018 that it was set to undertake political reforms which included opening up the democratic space and guaranteeing more political freedoms.

Subsequently, there were mass prisoner releases, including of leading political opponents and detained journalists.

 

The Ministry of Foreign affairs, in partnership with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), transported the returnees to their families.

Recently, the government of Sudan released about 1,400 Ethiopian prisoners following the visit of the Premier to that country.