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The Belarusian state managed without Interfax
On the eve of the parliamentary elections in Belarus, a unified system for distributing official state information is being created on the basis of the Ministry of Communications. Yesterday, Alexander Lukashenko held a meeting on this topic. Initially, it was assumed that the unified information holding would include the state agency BelTA, Belteleradiocompany, the newspaper Sovetskaya Belorussia and the Belarusian representative office of the Russian news agency Interfax. Actually, the very idea of creating a holding company for the dissemination of government information originally belonged to the head of the Interfax-West agency, Vyacheslav Zenkovich. The Belarusian president liked it, and he instructed Interfax to develop the structure of a new agency, the main clients of which should be government bodies and Belarusian diplomatic missions abroad.Interfax's active participation in the project is not surprising, since Interfax-West occupies a special position in the local information market. Along with BelTA, until recently Interfax actually had a monopoly on all official information. However, it seems that everything was replayed at the very last moment. An Interfax representative was not invited to the meeting with the president. The meeting was attended by the head of the administration Mikhail Myasnikovich, his deputy for ideology Vladimir Zametalin, KGB chief Vladimir Matskevich and the Minister of Communications. Alexander Lukashenko thanked Interfax for the preparatory work and said that “then we will do everything ourselves,” because the new structure “must be under the full control of the state.” On Monday morning, Vyacheslav Zenkovich confidently confirmed the rumor that Interfax-West would become part of the holding. A few hours later, he said that he did not yet have reliable information on this matter.
The head of the press service of the presidential administration, Dmitry Zhuk, said that the new agency is expected to appear by the end of September. According to him, this structure should be entirely state-owned.