The Strategic Initiatives Agency will get acquainted with its management board today: Vladimir Putin will announce the winners of the contest for the posts of the agency's general director and the heads of the three main areas.
A few months ago, Putin came up with the idea of creating a special organisation to support the initiatives of medium-sized business and for the Prime Minister to interact with regional entrepreneurs.
The agency is a non-commercial organisation and its rules will be established by the Russian government. Minister of Economic Development Elvira Nabiullina and Mayor of Troitsk (in the Moscow Region) Viktor Sidnev will be part of the organisation's main regulatory body - the Supervisory Council. Vladimir Putin himself will chair the board.
Apart from selecting investment projects, the agency will also be involved in the protection of medium- and small-sized business owners and in boosting their image. Another member of the supervisory council, President of Delovaya Rossiya Alexander Galushka, will supervise this aspect of the organisation's activities.
The agency will open regional branches. Initially there will only be two of them: in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk, though the Strategic Initiatives Agency (SIA) will launch subsidiaries in other regions very soon. Sverdlovsk Region Governor Alexander Misharin, another member of the supervisory council, will look after regional development.
The agency will rely on sponsors and benefactors in its work. Vnesheconombank has already allotted 100 million roubles as start-up capital to launch the agency's activities. The transfer of funds was registered as a charitable donation.
The main work of the agency's experts will consist in supporting 100-200 strategic projects a year. The SIA has already received around 1, 000 applications. Apart from electronic applications coming in through the agency's website, there are also postal applications to Government House. Some of the projects are based on surprising, even surreal ideas.
Expert Services LLC, for example, has suggested that expertise developed by them should be put into practice in order to solve the issue of pension contributions. The idea is to oblige the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation to issue loans to companies for amounts of at least 85 percent of the payments made by them into the budget. The developers believe that this will instantly relieve the tension of the increased tax burden, while at the same time provide a suitable investment object for the Pension Fund. Expert Services are unconcerned about the fact that the Pension Fund does not have any ready funds – its deficit before the tax increase stood at 1 trillion roubles.
The NPO "Optical Object Recognition" has proposed the installation of special kiosks equipped with the KRIMNET system developed by the company in place of the usual "Police wanted" stands. The system will automatically search for criminals – by verbal descriptions or by composite pictures.
Valery Shorin from the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area is asking for investment in order to increase people's financial awareness. The author of the project insists that if the project is realised with the help of the "SIA authority and any form of financing", "the veteran movement of Russia will receive decent and stable funds to sustain its activities directed at the support of all wars' veterans, the demographic situation in the country will improve, funds for people on medical leave will considerably increase, and Russia will offer payments to citizens during their recovery period after illness". This project is one of the favorites on the SIA site at the moment.
Inventor Yevgeny Kovalyov has asked for an investment of several billion dollars into "Yevgeny Kovalyov's Anti-gravity Crafts". With the help of the yet-to-be invented artificial gravity theory, he is going to make spacecraft capable of flying off to the stars without a large intake of fuel on board. "Why send such Cyclopean rockets into space... when we can fly to Mars more efficiently on a small anti-gravity craft?" asks the project's author's rhetorically.
All in all, the job of the SIA in choosing the most promising suggestions is a tough one.
Science fiction applications will not work, a government source promised "Izvestia". The experts will follow three basic criteria in making their choices: scalability (a project should have a systematic impact on the industy), innovativeness and non-interference in market competition.
Alexandra Bayazitova