VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
ARCHIVE OF THE OFFICIAL SITE
OF THE 2008-2012 PRIME MINISTER
OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION
VLADIMIR PUTIN
The Government convened a session yesterday. The first to arrive at the meeting was the Chief Sanitary Inspector, Gennady Onishchenko, who has been featured in the news recently in connection with the swine flu epidemic in Mexico. He watched the arriving ministers with a professional air. Upon his arrival in the hall, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, who recently returned from the United States, received an especially long gaze.
Yevgeny Primakov became Prime Minister at the height of the 1998 crisis. Although he had inherited mainly huge debts, even the acerbic liberal Andrei Illarionov admitted that “the economic policy pursued in that period was the best in several decades”. The snags set by the current crisis and how soon Russia will emerge from the recession were some of the subjects we discussed with the President of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Academician Yevgeny Primakov. He was interviewed for Izvestia by Marina Zavada and Yury Kulikov.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin chaired a meeting of the Governmental Budget Commission yesterday, at which the Government’s tax initiatives were discussed.
Donatas Banionis is one of the greatest stars in the Soviet film industry. We will always remember Mr Banionis as Vaitkus in “Nobody Wanted to Die”, Ladeinikov in “Off Season”, Kelvin in “Solaris”, Goya in Conrad Wolf’s film “Goya or the Hard Path to Knowledge”, Gabriel Conroy in the Western “Armed and Very Dangerous” and finally Kletchaty in “The Adventures of Prince Florizel”.
Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko promised to raise the issue of cutting Ukraine’s purchases of gas from Russia during her working visit to Moscow on April 29 to attend a meeting of the Economic Cooperation Committee of the Russian-Ukrainian Intergovernmental Commission. “We will discuss cuts in natural gas consumption by Ukraine,” Ms Tymoshenko told journalists yesterday.
Giving up the plan to increase insurance contributions to 34% starting in 2010 will cost the budget more than 1 trillion roubles, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin announced yesterday.
Cuts in the refinance rate and new initiatives aimed at supporting banks will not rapidly revive the system of lending to the non-financial sectors. But they will have a big psychological effect, as the authorities use them to signal their support of business now that the decline in production has stopped.
The Ministry of Economic Development is forever asking the Finance Ministry to give small business a break. Four years ago German Gref wrote to Alexei Kudrin asking him to not require small enterprises, which pay tax on imputed income, to use cash registers. Mr Gref asked, logically, why they need cash machines which register their revenue if the tax assessment is known in advance. Businessmen joked at the time that Mr Gref should be writing to the FSB and not to the Finance Minister.
Lawmakers want guarantees for the Government’s anti-crisis plan.
The Belarusian President is confident his country can deal with increasing foreign debt.
