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
Vladimir Putin visited Europe’s biggest railway carriage factory yesterday, located in the city of Tver. In 1942 the plant repaired tanks for the Kalinin Front. The enterprise is now experiencing hard times because the Russian Railways Company has reduced orders for carriages (from about a thousand in 2008 to almost half that number today). Employees have been put on a three-day workweek, their wages have dropped, and before long about 20% of the workforce will be laid off.
Extracts from Maurice Druon’s exclusive interview to Izvestia’s Paris correspondent Yuri Kovalenko.
At a meeting with the employees of the Tver Railway Carriage Plant (TVZ), Prime Minister Vladimir Putin promised to restructure all of the plant’s loans. “On the way to this meeting I spoke with the head of Sberbank. Soon he will issue instructions to the Tver branch to fully restructure your loan. He will do this today”, said Mr Putin, noting that the directive would cover consumer and mortgage loans taken out by people in the Tver Region, including the plant’s employees.
The former Georgian leader says resignation may be the crucial point in a politician’s career.
“Everybody knows that our land begins with the Kremlin”. It is almost a year since that line from a popular verset became irrelevant for Russian politics. Over the past months people have got used to the idea that while the President was officially the country’s leader real power resided in the Prime Minister’s office. How did the Russian state mechanism, geared to a single boss, react to such a “crumbling of foundations”? How is the country being run on a day-to-day basis? One can find an answer by taking a closer look at the bureaucrats who are sitting inside the Kremlin walls.
Developing infrastructure projects in a difficult economic situation is a sure way out of the crisis. This is an axiom. Prime Minister Putin told a meeting on the development of transport infrastructure in 2009, held in St Petersburg yesterday, that the Government would increase investments in the transport infrastructure by 100 billion roubles (to 550 billion roubles) compared with 2008.
During the past twenty years Europe has travelled a path from Gorbachev-mania to Putin-phobia. These were the opening words at the 20th Berlin Conference of the German economic and financial newspaper Handelsblatt uttered by the noted journalist Gabriele Krone-Schmalz, who had for many years worked as German television’s Channel 1 correspondent in Moscow.
Opening yesterday’s Government Presidium meeting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin warned that it had some “complicated and unpleasant issues” to discuss. The issues included housing and utilities and air transport.
At the end of March Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited the AvtoVAZ car plant and promised it government support in the amount of $3 billion. It was a gesture of unheard-of largesse. When Vladimir Putin was planning his visit to Togliatti he is said to have intended to shell out just 10 billion roubles, and then not in hard cash but in state guarantees of AvtoVAZ future loans (for an enterprise that reports losses obtaining loans in times of crisis is highly problematic). However, the Prime Minister was given a hearty welcome, he liked everything he saw and as an all-powerful man he promised more.
People are not interested to know what Government officials state in their income declarations, but they approve the idea of public disclosure.
