At a meeting with the employees of the Tver Railway Carriage Plant (TVZ), Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to restructure all of the plant's loans. "On the way to this meeting I spoke with the head of Sberbank. Soon he will issue instructions to the Tver branch to fully restructure your loan. He will do this today", said Mr Putin, noting that the directive would cover consumer and mortgage loans taken out by people in the Tver Region, including the plant's employees.
"One bank has already fully restructured loans. That leaves Sberbank, which is ready to restructure consumer loans, but has so far said nothing about mortgage loans," Mr Putin said. (Here and elsewhere quoted by Interfax).
He most likely had Transcreditbank (TCB) in mind, says the bank's chairman Sergei Pushkin. The bank's restructuring was not on a large scale, Mr Pushkin noted. It affected the approximately 10% of borrowers, including the employees of the plant, which is near a TCB office.
A source close to Transmash Holding, of which the Tver plant is part, reported that the Prime Minister raised the topic after one employee complained that the rates on loans for the plant had risen to 20% annually, and that its employees found it hard to service these loans because they had been put on a three-day work week as of March 1 with corresponding cuts in wages.
The Tver branch credit inspector, Yelena, told Vedomosti at 6:40 pm Moscow time that she had heard nothing about the directive on "full restructuring". Her branch had already rescheduled several loans, she said.
"We have been restructuring consumer loans since December 20 and we will soon start restructuring mortgage credits. Particular attention will be paid to this plant [the Tver Railway Carriage Plant]", said Sberbank's public relations director Irina Kibina. She and deputy president of Sberbank Dmitry Davydov had no available statistics concerning the bank's restructuring of retail loans as a whole.
The Tver Railway Carriage Plant employs 9,978 people. The population of the region is 1.4 million (1% of Russia's population), of which 654,000 are clients of Sberbank, although it is unknown how many of them have taken out loans.
By inviting the plant to participate in the programme of subsidising credit rates, Mr Putin was trying to help it as well as its employees. Prime TASS quotes Mr Putin as saying, "The enterprise is encumbered by credit resources, but this is not the fault of the management <...> the investment in modernisation was legitimate, and it is now necessary to help the plant sort it out".
Mr Putin also stated that the Tver Railway Carriage Plant will get more than 6 billion roubles worth of extra orders this year, including 3.1 billion roubles from Russian Railways. The Russian Railways order for this year will grow by 21.4%, to 17.1 billion roubles.
The Tver Railway Carriage Plant will also get orders for international transit and special products worth 3 billion roubles. If this comes to pass, the plant will retain its workforce, but if not, "things will be very hard" for the plant, says a representative of Transmash Holding. He did not specify how much the Tver Railway Carriage Plant owes, but as of October 1, 2008, the company's short-term debt stood at 4 billion roubles, its returns at 17.6 billion roubles, and net profits at 352.4 million roubles.
Such anti-crisis production meetings have proved to be effective and more trips to the regions are expected, says the Prime Minister's press spokesman Dmitry Peskov. But he did not reveal what regions and enterprises Mr Putin would visit and what support measures he would offer: such visits are usually unannounced.
By Alexander Glikin, Anna Terentyeva