Veterans ask Putin and Gryzlov to save Dalzavod.
The veterans' council of Dalzavod has sent a petition to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and the Speaker of the State Duma and Honorary Citizen of Vladivostok, Boris Gryzlov, voicing their concern over the fate of the enterprise and its employees and asking them to intervene.
"We, the Council of Veterans, the workers and shareholders of OAO HC Dalzavod would like to express to you our grave concern about the fate of the plant which is being prepared for liquidation," the document says. "Seven years of external management of OAO HC Dalzavod, from 2002 to 2009, far from improving it, brought it still closer to deliberate bankruptcy. The plant's debts... increased several times to reach 1.5 to 2.5 billion roubles, according to various estimates. In April 2009 (shortly after the enterprise was declared bankrupt by the Arbitration Court of the Primorye Territory - NG), the plant went into receivership, which led to the dismissal of A.Chavychalov (currently the deputy head of the Vladivostok Administration) and the appointment of another manager."
On September 29 the new external manager, Alexander Sazhnov, the authors of the petition point out, issued an order sacking all the 1,139 workers as of December 31, 2009 in connection with the plant's liquidation.
"Between 1950 and 1985 a dry dock, a bodywork shop, 150- and 240-metre moorage walls, a shop for the repair of the main and auxiliary machines and debugging - 28 facilities in all - were built," the veterans recall. "More than 20 facilities have been unlawfully sold."
In accordance with last year's Russian government directive, the management of the United Shipbuilding Corporation was to take measures to protect the interests of the RF by preserving the property of Dalzavod, but that directive has not been fulfilled, the authors of the letter claim.
"Nobody was punished for the illegal sale of 20 facilities. Part of the production capacity has been sold through front companies (in fact transferred free of charge for imaginary services) to the so-called OAO Dalzavod Plant, without the letters HC (Dremlyuga D.V.)." The authors point a finger at a prominent businessman, a business partner of State Duma deputy from Primorye, Ruslan Kondratov.
"It is unclear why a facility that is located on the only ice-free harbour, Zolotoy Rog, should be liquidated. The site had been chosen under Tsar Alexander III as a repair base for the Russian Navy," says the letter signed by the chairman of the veteran council of OAO HC Dalzavod Valentin Logvinov and a score of other people.
Today, a Sollers company production facility is being set up in one of the Dalzavod shops. This largely political project is directly linked with the "automobile standoff" between the federal centre and the Far East. Dalzavod veterans describe this apparently well-meaning initiative as a "total outrage": "The technological fittings and equipment in the main bodywork shop are being dismantled by the firm Sollers to turn it into a car assembly shop. The shop built to new designs, 40 m high and provided with 50-ton hoisting and transportation machines and unique equipment for making the bodies of any kind of vessel - all this is being scrapped... Most importantly the dismissal of the workers of pre-retirement and retirement age, who have experience in the shipbuilding industry, will damage the repair of naval vessels because no young experts in this field have been trained."
Vasily Avchenko