Translated material
Combat draw
“Today at the meeting we agreed on key points,” Minister of Economic Development and Trade German Gref told the Vremya Novostey newspaper, “we identified goals, principles and main tasks that must be implemented during the reforms.” The head of the Ministry of Railways, Nikolai Aksenenko, was also pleased with the meeting. The press service of the Ministry of Railways told the Vremya Novostei newspaper that the existing contradictions were largely resolved. The only loser, perhaps, is Ilya Yuzhanov, the head of the antimonopoly agency, whose right to regulate tariffs at the first stage of railway reform was decided to be transferred to a government commission. The appearance of the commission Mr. Aksenenko can count to his credit: last week it was he who, after acute correspondence Discussions with the head of MAP suggested creating it.
As for the goals of the Ministry of Railways reform itself, a proposal that was closer in spirit to the version of Mr. Gref’s department received support. Deputy head of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade Andrei Sharonov, who oversees the topic of reforming natural monopolies, described the possible choice before the meeting in this way: “Freeing the state from the need to pay subsidies and increasing the efficiency of railway transport as a business is one goal. The second option involves increasing the accessibility and quality of railways for the entire economy. We are focusing on the second goal."
According to the Vremya Novostey newspaper, Mikhail Kasyanov defined the goal of the reform as “preserving the country’s single economic space while ensuring accessibility and safety of transportation while simultaneously reducing economic costs.”
The reform principles named by the Prime Minister combine proposals coming from both the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade and the Ministry of Railways. This is the separation of competitive and monopoly sectors, a supra-departmental tariff policy, increasing the investment attractiveness of the industry both through its financial transparency and through organizational mechanisms, ending cross-subsidies and ensuring non-discriminatory access to transport infrastructure.
However, a deeper level of elaboration of these tasks in the concept of reforming the Ministry of Railways is still to come. First, the basic provisions of the reform will be discussed at a government meeting on November 9. And then, quite likely, a specially formed government commission will continue to work on them. In any case, this scenario was not ruled out by our source in the government apparatus in a conversation with a correspondent of the Vremya Novostei newspaper.