OREANDA-NEWS. October 26, 2010. Federal Agency for Arrangement of the Russian Federation State Border (Rosgranitsa) does not rule out the use of public-private partnership scheme for building and reconstruction of sea border crossing points, Elena Kitova, the chief of the department of state policy for development of the state border told in an interview. The federal agency has proposed to include the relevant rule in the bill on Russia’s border crossing checkpoints.

"We believe this is reasonable to involve private businesses, because market participants have a direct interest in the checkpoints operations," Elena Kitova was quoted as saying.

The public-private partnership scheme would be more important for seaports’ checkpoints rather than for the road border crossing points, the official said.

As Dmitry Morozov, a spokesman for the Association of Sea Commercial Ports noted speaking at the Moscow second International Conference "Modern border management. International experience and its applicability in Russia" the public-private partnership is very important for domestic ports. According to him, it is true that there are several terminals located at a port, which impose different border control procedures. Actually, an oil terminal border control point has just few officers, while the staff of a container terminal checkpoint is quite big.

"Stevedore companies agree on any acceptable schemes of investments into the border crossing points. Think, it is right that this should not be a 100-percent funding by the state of the points’ development and reconstruction. The question is how to reduce the costs," Mr. Morozov said.

According to him, it is necessary to optimize the amount of border control procedures, and standardize the sea crossing points so as to not have to build clone facilities at each port terminal. 

In accordance with Article 15 of the bill on border checkpoints, construction, equipping and reconstruction of such points may be carried out by the investor on a competitive basis. At the same time such constructed or renovated objects should be transferred by the investor on a grant basis, to relevant government bodies. The bill says the checkpoints maintenance, in this case, should be funded only through the federal budget in order to avoid the investor’s influence on the state authorities. Currently, the draft law is under discussion.