OREANDA-NEWS. The Chairman of EUROCEMENT group's Board of Directors Filaret Galchev, at the Advisory Board meeting on Interaction of the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC) and the Belorussian-Kazakhstani-Russian business relations, underlined the need to accept the Customs Union regulation "On the safety of buildings, facilities, building materials and products" as soon as possible, based on the growth of counterfeit products and poor quality imported material on the building materials market in CU countries.

"According to research from the Higher School of Economics, the overall market share of counterfeit products is between 5 and 10% globally. In Russia, it's reaching 30-35%, and in the bagged cement market, up to 40%. At the same time, the amount of imported cement on the market in CU member states already amounts to almost 6 million tons, and this product to some extent does not correspond to the climate conditions of our countries, or to our safety standards. The emerging situation creates problems for conscientious manufacturers, makes them unable to compete and violates the basic principle of products manufactured for use - the principle of safety, which is set in stone in the technical regulations of the Customs Union.

The outline of a technical regulation requiring building materials to be certified for quality underwent the procedure of intra-state agreement back in 2012. But since then, it's been under development for a long time, while the market has remained unprotected from low quality, unsafe products for all this time. In connection with this, now like never before, we must create the conditions to protect building material manufacturers in the EEC by means of a quality control system and by agreeing to implement the Customs Union technical regulation "On the safety of buildings, facilities, building materials and products" as soon as possible. This will allow us to create equal competitive conditions on the unified EEC market for building material manufacturers, provide quality control up to the release of products onto the market, and to prevent harm both to customers and to the entire building industry of the CU countries in general", noted Filaret Galchev in his speech.