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Russian private company to start paying outstanding wages to striking miners

On August 22, 120 miners at the King Coal mines, which are on the verge of bankruptcy, went on hunger strike because of huge wage arrears worth more than 300 million rubles

GUKOVO /Rostov region/, August 25 /TASS/. Miners at Kings Coal mines in Russia’s Rostov region who went on hunger strike over wage arrears will start getting their outstanding wages back as of August 25 through the Regional Development Corporation joint-stock company, Vasily Golubev, the governor of the Rostov region, said at a meeting with a group of striking miners on Wednesday.

"I have asked the Regional Development Corporation, an outside organization, to start paying your outstanding wages…We are going to pay up to 50 million rubles (767, 200 U.S.)," Golubev said.

He added that the region did not have an opportunity to pay 300 million rubles worth of outstanding wages to more than 2,000 people from the regional budget.

"This mechanism is not stipulated by bankruptcy laws. It is one of the ways to soften the problem," Andrei Sysoyenkov, the deputy prosecutor of the Rostov region, said.

However, the miners themselves told TASS they would not go off the hunger strike until all their wage arrears were paid.

On August 22, 120 miners at the King Coal mines, which are on the verge of bankruptcy, went on hunger strike because of huge wage arrears worth more than 300 million rubles (4.6 million U.S. dollars).