Rustem Khamitov: “We stand in ratings at rather good level”

The President of Bashkortostan Rustem Khamitov has taken part in the meeting of Russian Government, held under chairmanship of Dmitry Medvedev, on December 20. Problems in improvement of business climate in Russia and attraction of investments were under discussion, public affairs service of the President RB reports.

Rustem Khamitov has mentioned, speaking before the members of Russian Government, that the Republic started working with investors consciously and systematically two years ago.

“In 2010 any work for attraction of investments in such well-developed republic as Bashkortostan was absent. Legislation, corresponding institutions and the strategy itself were absent too. Now we begin active formation of investment infrastructure. All that is already available and concrete results are also to the fore. More than 60 contracts on big investment projects for the total sum about 400 billion rubles were signed. We stand in ratings at rather good level and certain progress can be clearly seen now” – the President RB said and halted on the main problems.

“First, we have to introduce the rules of the game – standards, “road maps”, monitoring etc. This is what we were doing jointly with federal authority and with the Strategic Initiatives Agency. Here the situation looks more or less normal. The second problem is expenses and finances. It is clear that even such powerful region as Bashkortostan isn’t able to finance infrastructure for investors alone and we need certain compensation mechanisms here. We have to think how to attract federal means for such work. We all know that there are successful regions but even they are overloaded with debt obligations and it is still not clear how they are going to find the way out of this situation. The third problem is direct search for investors and formation of clusters. In this direction we determined that we would develop chemistry, machine building, radioelectronics and agriculture” – the President RB reported.

The President RB offered several proposals. In his opinion they are simple enough.

“I suggest that federal structures should join the process of investments attraction. I think that some temporary managerial structures can be established especially for big corporate projects at the federal level. Foreign countries are familiar with such practice. Let’s take chemistry for example. At the regional level we aren’t able to solve this problem and I believe that such competent centers have to be established at the federal level and it would be easier for us to work with them – five years passed, the problem is solved and this structure can be easily reformatted. The work of “ROSNANO” can be sited here as an example. Besides, the criteria of estimation of the regions should be corrected too because we have different geographic conditions and different level of specialists. One can’t compare Magadan, for instance, and Sverdlovsk region because the growth of industrial production by 1% in such republic as ours is much bigger than 10%-growth in a small region. My proposal is the following: we have to activate joint work on concrete objects and projects with the federal government” – Rustem Khamitov stated.