“Komsomolskaya Pravda”: “Vladimir Putin: “I believe Russia will win the football match””
The Prime Minister gave his forecast of the outcome of the football match of the year during his trip to Tatarstan where oil and gas issues were discussed.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin spent the whole day yesterday in Tatarstan visiting the KamAZ plant in Naberezhnye Chelny, the Nizhnekamskneftekhim complex and, late in the evening, conducting a meeting on the development of the oil processing industry.
The Prime Minister visited KamAZ to launch the diesel engines assembly line at the Russian-American enterprise CUMMINS-KAMA. Putin liked what he saw. His previous visit to the enterprise took place at the height of the crisis. The plant was at a standstill and workers faced layoffs.
"At the time we mapped out a programme to support the enterprise and the automotive industry, and all of it has worked," Putin told KamAZ workers with obvious pleasure. "We allocated additional money to buy vehicles for state needs. I hope that with your assistance and given active work of the KamAZ management, the plant will recover from the crisis little by little."
The Prime Minister was told that since September the enterprise was producing 2,500 trucks a month, which was half of what it produced before the crisis. But there are signs of stability.
According to the KamAZ spokesman, in addition to the government's support the plant implemented its own anti-crisis programme by cutting the salaries of top managers and giving up bonuses.
The plant now needs more money, though not to survive, but to develop. KamAZ has joint ventures with foreign companies and uses Western technologies to develop new parts and components for its trucks. It needs a loan of 10 billion roubles to implement these projects.
Time was too short for Vladimir Putin to talk with the workers for any length of time but he promised to answer their questions during his live phone-in. He said a camera crew would be sent to KamAZ for this purpose. The workers, however, could not wait for the phone-in to discuss football as the second-leg match of our football team against Slovenia is to be held today.
"It is very difficult to make forecasts in sport. It is like crystal ball-gazing," Putin said cautiously. "But our side will win."
In the meantime they were waiting for the Prime Minister at one of the country's largest oil refineries in Nizhnekamsk. The enterprise was a city within a city although the industrial landscapes looked sinister against the sunset and the smell of oil gave everybody a headache. It is hard to imagine how people work here, but they are building a plant with a record-high degree of oil processing (96%). This was the subject of discussion at the meeting on the development of the oil processing complex.
Vladimir Putin told his audience that Russia was selling oil and gas and then had to buy expensive petroleum products, most probably extracted from our raw materials, from other countries. Therefore developing deep processing of our resources was a must. Naturally this made it necessary to develop capacity and new technologies. If there is an opportunity to buy foreign technologies we had better do it, Putin said. Otherwise work cannot be effective.
"Government assistance should be rendered above all to established and competitive companies, we should not keep ineffective companies afloat at all costs," the Prime Minister stressed. "It is also necessary to prevent abuse of monopoly positions in the sector, above all by the structures which have become monopolies during the privatisation of Soviet-era infrastructure."
In Putin's opinion, part of the problem is that oil and gas enterprises in the country have been fragmented recently whereas in the developed countries, on the contrary, these companies have been enlarged. As a result, our enterprises are unable to compete with giants, to obtain credits and finance new development.
Nigina Beroyeva
