Izvestia: "Vladimir Putin Spends a Day Discussing Shipbuilding"
The Prime Minister has inspected the leading enterprises in the Far East. After watching a Russia-Canada hockey match, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin set off for the East: he will spend the whole of today in Japan, will be in Mongolia tomorrow, and he stopped over in Komsomolsk-on-Amur yesterday.
What Mr Putin saw in that city, the largest industrial centre in the Russian Far East, swept away the afterglow from watching Russia beat Canada in the ice hockey championship: the famous Amur Shipbuilding Plant, which for decades had been building nuclear and diesel powered submarines and civil vessels, is facing closure. Mr Putin found a way out and effectively announced renationalisation of the enterprise. Before Mr Putin was taken to the Amur Shipbuilding Plant, he was shown the Gagarin Production Association, which assembles "the hope of the domestic civil aviation," Sukhoi Superjet-100 (SSJ).
Two planes have been completed and two more are in the finishing stretch. The first serial machine is in the final assembly shop. If flight tests go well, it will carry its first passengers next year. They will be Armenians because an advance payment for the first plane has been made by the Armenian Airline Armavia. All in all, 98 orders have been placed, but there have been fewer and fewer new orders in recent month. In the opinion of Sukhoi's director general, Mikhail Pogosyan, the problem of orders may be solved through government financing of sales. As in many such recent cases, the problem of lack of demand for a commodity can be solved by administrative methods.
However, some other factors may hold back demand. Some experts point out that SSJ's engine air intakes are positioned too low (just 42 cm from the landing strip surface), which makes the aircraft unfit for most Russian airports because litter and concrete chips will be sucked into the engines.
"Evil tongues," says Ilya Kostin, chief of the final assembly division. "The engines are made in Rybinsk jointly with France, the French were throwing sand into the turbines with shovels - and nothing happened.
Mr Pogosyan added that not only sand but also chickens were thrown into the engines and nothing happened.
Mr Putin made a quick round of the workshop, looked at the turbines which have been tested by the French, ignored the Frenchmen who were huddled behind a makeshift wire mesh fence and walked up the boarding ramp into one of the planes. He sat in the first pilot's seat for about five minutes before climbing down to meet the workers who were waiting for him.
"You make good products, Mr Putin told them. Because of the growing cost of production and spares, we have decided to increase financing by 6.8 billion roubles: 3.2 billion will go to increase the authorised capital of Sukhoi Civil Aircraft and 3.6 billion will be channelled through the federal targeted programme Development of Civil Aviation.
"We are happy", the workers told Putin.
The Amur shipyard was the next stop. In fact, plant is a misnomer. After walking through the staples between unfinished submarines Mr Putin met Alexander Astrakhantsev, a plant worker, and proceeded to give him the good tidings. He told Mr Astrakhantsev that his enterprise's accounts payable stood at 36 billion roubles and that the Prime Minister would "sort out" the question of inefficient owners and the problem of state orders. Mr Putin then invited Mr Astrakhantsev to join him in the conference.
The worker could have told his interlocutor a great deal. In recent months the payment of shrunken wages has been constantly delayed. The management had promised to repay the wage arrears before May 9, but not everyone has been paid. An Internet forum in Komsomolsk claimed that the money went to prepare the Prime Minister's visit: the second floor of the plant's management office was in need of repair. Izvestia's correspondents did notice several brand-new windowpanes with protective film still on.
However, Mr Astrakhantsev was thinking in global terms.
"Most members of our collective would like the plant to be taken back by the state, this is the opinion everyone shares", he appealed to Mr Putin. If you do it, if you deprivatise the plant, it will recover gradually, we want back... into state ownership."
Mr Putin promptly declared that this would happen. It turned out that private shareholders, who owned 59% of the plant, had agreed to sell their stake to Sberbank, which Sberbank would then transfer for a symbolic price to the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC).
"Deprivatisation is not our goal, but if the owner is inefficient, we should see how to change the situation, especially when we are talking about enterprises closely involved with the fulfilment of the state defence order," Mr Putin explained his decision.
In addition the Amur shipyards would get $400 million through the USC, more than 580 million roubles from the Defence Ministry and, after a while, 1.9 billion roubles to finish and conduct tests of the current projects.
"Are you sure life will be better now that the state will become the owner?" I asked Mr Astrakhantsev, who emerged from the conference room wearing a boiler suit and hard hat. He was heading for the factory floor.
"I am not just sure, I am absolutely sure," he replied.
"Do you know that the state is a bad owner?" a Western journalist teased him.
"Of course I do."
"And still you are not afraid?"
"We are not afraid because a person believes the state, but not the owner," Mr Astrakhantsev wriggled out adding that he trusted Mr Putin personally because he was an "excellent person and an excellent Prime Minister".
Thus the state, the owner of his plant and Mr Putin were blended into a trinity in Mr Astrakhantsev's hard-hatted head.
By Alexander Latyshev
