MOSCOW, April 19 (Itar-Tass) – Chief of Russian Post federal enterprise, Alexander Kiselyov, has been fired from office, Andrei Monakov, a spokesman for the enterprise told Itar-Tass.
The man appointed to replace Kiselyov is the former Director General of the Russian division of the Tele2 cellular service operator, Dmitry Strashnov, the press service of the Ministry of Communications said.
“Strashnov has been appointed Director General of the Russian Post federal enterprise in line with a resolution issued by the Communications Minister April 19, 2013,” a spokesman told Itar-Tass.
Dmitry Strashnov, born in Moscow in 1967, is a graduate of the Nikolai Bauman State University of Technology and the INSEAD business school.
Over the past eighteen years, Strashnov has occupied executive posts in a number of European companies operating in the sphere of consumer goods and telecommunications.
From April 2009 through to January 2013, he was President and Director General of Tele2 Russia.
This state-run company has been plagued by numerous problems of late. Of the 42,000 post offices it has across the country, almost 70% are loss-making. Equipment is warn-out and outdated practically at the post offices and the service car fleets also need an urgent overhaul.
The Russian postal system badly wants construction of fully-automated sorting and exchange offices and the depots for international postal exchanges where the mailings arriving from abroad would be processed.
Russian Post reached a loss-free level of operations only in 2009. In 2012, its profit totaled 813 million rubles but the bulk of it went off in remunerations to workers.
Last week, the stockpiles of mailings awaiting customs clearance formalities at Moscow’s major airports reached a total of 500 tons. The situation was caused by an outstripping growth of e-commerce and a shortage of customs personnel for inspecting the mailings.
Russian Post top executives took some emergency steps to resolve the situation. They built up many times over the number of workers engaged in the efforts to clear the backlog of parcels at airports round the clock and redirected the flows of incoming mail bound for Moscow to other cities for inspection.
As a result, the total amount of unprocessed mailings dropped to 150 tons over the week but the problem is that new mail continues arriving all the time.