04 June 2004 17:32
Russian Audit Chamber to report on "laughably low" proceeds of privatization
Moscow, 4 June: The Audit Chamber of the Russian Federation today reviewed the preliminary results of analysis of the
privatization of state property in 1993-2003. This information is officially secret and will be released at a meeting of
the Audit Chamber collegium in June.
But an ITAR-TASS correspondent was told at the Audit Chamber that the analysts' conclusions "will be of
serious social significance". "The amounts received from privatization are laughably low by comparison with
what was expected," a representative of the Audit Chamber noted. The auditors think a number of participants in
privatization "permitted illicit actions".
In the near future the auditors will draw up an analytical memorandum and report on the basis of the material they
have on breaches of the law during privatization, which "could become the basis for an approach to the
Prosecutor-General's Office accordingly".
Chairman of the Audit Chamber Sergey Stepashin said earlier that some methods of privatization were of a
"piratical nature". He said experts from the Chamber had calculated on the basis of open source information
from the Russian statistical annuals for 2001 and 2003 that the government received only 9.7bn dollars from the
privatization of 145,000 enterprises.
[ITAR-TASS news agency] |
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