Russian Prime Minister V.V Putin Conducts a Meeting of State Corporation ‘Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs (Vnesheconombank)’ Supervisory Board

V.V Putin’s Opening Address

Good afternoon, Esteemed Colleagues!

In the last months VEB has been playing and now continues to play an important role of the Government’s agent for implementing crisis management measures. There are issues related to this activity on our current meeting’s agenda. Our proposal is to extend a subordinated loan worth 75 billion rubles to Gazprom.

And Gazprom in its turn is to undertake to extend loans for the said amount to real economy enterprises and at acceptable interest rate as we agreed earlier, that is, the Central Bank’s refinancing rate plus 3%.

This is not a one-time obligation and Gazprom and other subordinated loan recipient banks must support financing amounts agreed upon earlier within a whole period of state support.

I’d like to say it once more that while Vnesheconombank is actively involved in implementing an anti-crisis program, its core function is not to address the current problems but to boost the country’s long-term development and the implementation of major capital-intensive investment projects.

You know that some time ago I signed an order for contributing another 100 billion rubles to VEB’s charter capital for these purposes. And today we are to consider several new projects. Here I mean the construction of an electric power plant in Western Siberia and a new cement factory in the Penza region.

I’d like to ask you to finalize the issue associated with building an auto assembly enterprise in the Primorski region in Vladivostok. We talked many times that a transfer of auto production to our country’s territory should become a real alternative to auto import, especially to the import of second –hand cars.

They have been implementing this plan quite successfully in the European part of Russia. In the last years, several major auto plants have been opened and thousands of new effective jobs have been created here. Almost all major auto makers have come to Russia. Now Far East’s turn has come where there are favorable conditions for launching modern auto production.

And lastly, we intend to earmark 10 billion rubles for financing small and medium-sized enterprises. This sum is to be contributed to a specialized bank’s charter capital; this bank is incorporated in VEB’s Group. As the experience showed, its programs are in high demand in the regions. Here I mean the Russian Development Bank.

Let’s get started with our work.

Origin: Internet-Portal of the Government of the Russian Federation