OREANDA-NEWS. October 12, 2009. Good afternoon, Esteemed Colleagues! Let’s start a meeting of Vnesheconombank’s Supervisory Board

I’d like to remind you that at our previous Supervisory Board meeting in September we heard the information on the progress of reorganizing VEB’s subsidiary banks.

Today we’ll consider an issue on the strategy of managing VEB’s group of lending institutions.

And in this respect, I’d like to say the following: we believe that Vnesheconombank’s participation in the financial restructuring of a number of commercial banks is a forced project. This was VEB’s contribution to joint efforts to maintain sustainability and operability of the Russian financial system in the situation of the global crisis.

The end result of these efforts should be the full restoration of problem lending institutions’ solvency and their subsequent sale on the terms beneficial for VEB and of course for the country as a whole.

At the same time, in order to support small and medium-sized enterprises and encourage industrial exports, the Bank for Development will continue to participate in the capital of specialized banks and perhaps other institutions.

Another crisis management measure in which VEB participated was to extend credits to major domestic companies. This made it possible to refinance their debts to foreign financial creditors avoiding the sale of important strategic assets under the conditions of the crisis and at a knocked down price at that. In total, the amount of such loans was about 11 billion dollars.

I must say that borrowers are servicing VEB’s credits properly by making interest payments and repaying principal on schedule.

Nevertheless, a number of borrowers requested the Bank to roll their loans over. Today, we are to consider these requests. I was told that the situation differed from borrower to borrower. Some borrowers are in a position to repay their loans.

We’ll consider both their financial and economic position taking into account their prospects for development. We’ll take into account the market conditions and the current financial position of borrower-companies. But in any case there will no writing-offs.

We’ll also analyze proposals for financing a number of major projects, specifically, in shipbuilding in the North-West of the country in Primorsk.

At the same time, VEB is addressing an issue of its participation in constructing new shipbuilding facilities in the Far East as well. Here I mean the project on the basis of Zvezda plant

In my opinion, it is these enterprises being built from scratch with the use of cutting edge technology that would be capable of restoring leading positions of our shipbuilding industry on the world market and meeting our companies’ demand for oil and oil products delivery ships and in the long term liquefied gas ships.

Let’s get started with our work.