Thank you, Your Majesty.

At the very start, I would like to express the gratitude of myself and the First Lady and of all our delegation for the invitation, a very kind invitation that Your Majesty has extended to us for this state visit and upon which we have embarked on today.

I would like to thank the hospitality that has been shown by Your Majesty and the Royal Family of Brunei and the people of Brunei.

This reflects the warm relations that our countries have had for a very long time now. It is timely that I visit — I have my first state visit as President here to Brunei as this year, we are celebrating the 40th anniversary of our diplomatic relations.

But I think, any student of history will be — it will be very clear to any student of history that that relationship has been going on for a much, much longer time than the formal 40 years.

I was just commenting to His Majesty that when we look at the history of the Philippines, there was a large part of our history where large parts of the Philippines, all the way up to Luzon and around Manila were in fact administered by the Sultan of Brunei.

And that has — that relationship and that warmth and that closeness has continued all throughout the years through the different changes that we have all gone through.

It is also particularly important that we conduct this state visit as we are now presently faced by many global challenges for which Brunei and the Philippines have very many common interest.

And so, it is important that we continue to work together on a bilateral basis, also together with ASEAN, with BIMP-EAGA in all of these methods by which we can, we can plan together for our own communities, but also for the peace and the stability of the region, and not only for Asia, but for the Indo-Pacific as well.

It is important that those partnerships now be brought back into the modern world. And I think that I look forward for this state visit to once more give an added impetus and warmth and inspiration to the relationship between our two countries.

The signing of the Memoranda of Understanding that we witnessed today are a significant step as we have made arrangements and partnerships and alliances in very many different sectors, all of which are terribly important in the area of agriculture, in the area of people-to-people relationships to tourism, in the area of transport, in the area of diplomacy.

And all of these, I believe now will be again, a birth of new time together for Brunei and the Philippines, and as we forge our way ahead, I am very happy to know that Brunei Darussalam and the Royal family and the Sultan are with us and by our side and it gives us a very optimistic view of the future.

Once again, Your Majesty, I thank you very much and the people of Brunei Darussalam for the very kind hospitality that you have shown us and all the hard work that both our teams have put in to make the arrangements and the partnerships that we have begun today possible.

Thank you very much! Mabuhay.

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