Catafree market helps Syria overcome decades of isolation.

Life in the UK.

This is the Marketplace Morning Report from the BBC World Service.

I'm Leanna Byrne. Good morning.

Let's start in Syria, where the country's new transitional authority is calling on Western nations to lift longstanding sanctions that were imposed during the rule of the Assad family.

For years, European nations enforced bans on the sale of weapons and oil to Syria,

as well as on investments in the country.

But the rebels who now run Syria are assuring the country's business community

that it will embrace a free market economy and push to reconnect with global markets.

Shawee is president of the International Chamber of Commerce in Syria.

His family have been in business for more than a century,

running pharmaceutical, paper and industrial companies.

He says that if Syria is going to become a free market economy,

overcoming corruption is key to its success.

The problem, we always had regulation which were in the gray area. And whenever you are in a

gray area, you have a huge opportunity of corruption. We had so many invisible expenses which were killing us, you know, starting from the customs

to the Ministry of Finance, to the Ministry of Economy, and so on and so forth.

As a matter of fact, all this has been abolished already.

A big part of it has been abolished.

So this will give us more space to work. And by

definitions, the corruption is going to go down. And it's not just corruption. He says Western

sanctions remain a massive roadblock for the country right now. Sanctions helps the parallel

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