Grigol Vashadze, the Georgian foreign minister, will start an official visit to Azerbaijan on January 18, which will help to further deepen already close ties between the two countries, the Georgian Foreign Ministry said.

Vashadze will meet his Azerbaijan counterpart Elmar Mammadyarov and President Ilham Aliyev to discuss broad range of political and economic cooperation issues, Georgian Deputy Foreign Minister, Nino Kalandadze, said on January 17.

Last week Azerbaijani news agency, Azeri-Press Agency (APA), reported quoting the president of Azerbaijan's state-owned oil firm SOCAR, Rovnag Abdullayev, that the company was interested in purchasing the North-South Gas Pipeline, which is used for transporting Russian gas to Armenia via Georgia. Abdullayev, according to this report, said that SOCAR was in talks over the matter with the Georgian government and the state-run Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation. The Georgian Energy Ministry’s spokesperson told Civil.ge last week that the ministry would not comment on the report.

Nino Kalandadze said that the issue would not be part of discussions during the Georgian Foreign Minister’s visit to Azerbaijan.