MOSCOW, April 10 (Itar-Tass) —— Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has demanded that the Cabinet of Ministers should accelerate privatization.
“The government must find the courage to carry out privatization in full,” Medvedev said at a meeting with the Open Government.
He regretted that the decisions made in favor of privatization failed to be acted on.
“First a decision is made, and then a crowd of lobbyists flocks in at the government level,” he said, adding that many of the lobbyists had very fine intentions.
“Decisions are diluted with expediency considerations,” Medvedev said. As an example he mentioned proposals for “not touching this industrial plant because it is very important, or for privatizing a certain enterprise only in 2-3 years’ time when the situation on the market gets better.”
Medvedev made this remark in reply to a statement by the president of the MICEX-RTS Ruben Aganbegian. The specialist said that in Russia there were too many government-owned enterprises and he called for conducting privatization in Russia as fast as possible, because there was a lack of competitive environment. Aganbegian also claimed that inside state-run companies there had appeared “many effective managers”, whose efforts caused public companies to swell.