State corporations must operate under strict state control, transparently - Medvedev
MOSCOW. Oct 29 (Interfax) - President Dmitry Medvedev wants to accelerate the passage of a bill concerning the operation of the state corporations.
"The bill must be passed. This needs to be done quickly, because the work is taking too long," Medvedev said at a meeting on Friday to discuss execution of his instructions.
"The state corporations are a specific form of organization for conducting the state's business, which should be carried out under strict state control on transparent principles, with an understanding of goals and outcomes," he said.
"Control over the operations of the state corporations must remain maximally clear, to preclude speculation about what is going on there and about what the consequences of one or another action will be," he said.
"All the more so since the government has approved a host of decisions on reducing the state's participation in the economy - privatization," he said.
"There must not be a situation in which the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing," he said.
The president did not for now call for monitoring the quality of operation of the state corporations.
Economic Development Minister Elvira Nabiullina told Medvedev that the transformation of the state enterprises is proceeding in accordance with the schedule approved by the government. She recalled that "in accordance with the schedule, the transformation of the Rusnano state corporation is to be completed by year-end."
"Work is underway for the rest of the [state] corporations, whose transformation will involve a transition period: commercial assets are being spun off into subsidiary stock companies," Nabiullina said, adding that she had in mind Rostekhnologii and Vnesheconombank (VEB).
Prior to corporatizing the state corporations, measures are taken to raise their transparency, she said.
"Strategies have been drawn up at all the [state] corporations, which introduce new results-oriented systems for paying employees, stipulate independent audits and that purchases be made on electronic exchanges," she said.
Medvedev, addressing Rostekhnologii chief Sergei Chemezov, said: "The faster the corporatization of the state corporations takes place, the less thievery there will be. Otherwise it will be a black hole and you will constantly be calling the police and the general prosecutor."
Chemezov told the president that work on corporatizing Rostekhnologii is taking place "in complete contact with the government." However, Chemezov said he saw a problem "associated with the formation of the property complex."
Those issues include "the lack of documents of title to the land and buildings, insufficient funds to form charter capital, illegal transfer of state property."
Rostekhnologii has registered 60 instances of the illegal transfer of state property, for which 55 criminal cases have been opened. "The claims total 2.4 billion rubles, of which about 750 million rubles have already been recovered," he said.
A total of 25 enterprises were corporatized in 2010, 90 more will be corporatized in 2011 and 69 in 2012. "All of the shares will be transferred to the holding companies for civilian and defense production," Chemezov said.