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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: God afternoon, friends. I am very happy to see you.

We regularly meet with our colleagues, partners, investors, and we met here at the forum last year. I am very happy to see you again, to know that you are interested in developing our relations.

I am sure you have noticed the professionalism demonstrated by our Direct Investment Fund under the leadership of Mr Dmitriyev. It has already attracted over $10 billion, and we, in turn, are allocating funds for priority projects that are of interest to us.

We are now attracting funding from the National Welfare Fund for a number of promising projects, including high technology ones. I spoke about this at the plenary session today.

One such project is to bring high-speed internet to small and remote residential areas of Russia. Another one is to enhance the infrastructural capacity of our power grids. We have many other interesting areas of cooperation as well.

I will not make any lengthy speeches. Today we can speak informally of the issues you find worth discussing.

I would like to ask Mr Dmitriev to say a few words.

Russian Direct Invetsment Fund Ceo Kirill Dmitriev: Mr President, colleagues, thank you.

I wanted very briefly to tell you that here today we have heads of the world’s leading funds managing more than $3.6 trillion. This is a trillion more than we had last year.

Practically all the major sovereign funds of the world are represented here. I believe it is very significant that they believe in the prospects of the Russian economy and have come to Russia in these complicated geopolitical times.

The President has mentioned a number of deals. True, yesterday the RDIF Supervisory Board approved investment from the National Welfare Fund, and a number of our co-investors are taking part in these projects, which are of great significance for Russia.

In addition, this week we approved a deal to invest $700 million into the Sibur liquefied natural gas terminal, and investment into agriculture jointly with Arab, Chinese and European investors.

During the visit to China, we announced three new deals of the Russian-Chinese fund: investment into logistics, tourism and the construction of the first bridge between Russia and China. Thus, within only one week the Fund closed a series of very important deals.

Our rate of return is rather good: our first deals were the acquisition of a small stake in the Moscow Exchange, which brings in 20% annual interest, and a deal with Rostelecom, where we have made over 30%.

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