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President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr Fradkov, the bank that was established not so long ago is to accomplish highly ambitious tasks. We have repeatedly discussed its establishment and subsequent growth. What do you think about its current status and short-term prospects?

Promsvyazbank CEO Pyotr Fradkov: Mr President, this is absolutely correct. I was instructed about a year ago to work on a programme that you approved. The programme aimed to reorganisePromsvyazbank to turn it into a bank that would support state defence contracts and defence industry companies.

The bank is actively conducting this work together with the Government and the Central Bank. Today, the bank supports virtually 40 percent of state defence contracts and ranks among other leading banks in this respect.

We have accumulated resources and started loaning money to the industry’s companies very actively. The latest reporting period shows that we have issued almost 200 billion rubles’ worth of financial support to defence industry companies.

Moreover, according to our forecasts and our strategic long-term plan the bank will be able to issue loans for up to 70 percent of all the defence industry contracts.

We are now working on it and it is important for us to provide legislative support, and grant it a status of a support bank, particularly following your instructions. We are now completing this work and relevant draft laws have already been prepared.

Nevertheless, we do not forget about our fairly extensive presence in the regions and in other branches of the economy. The bank has actively launched support for small and medium-sized companies.

This is one of our bank’s specialised areas. Literally in the past few months, we have brought our guarantee loan support for small and medium-sized companies to 140 billion rubles.

We are of course working with individuals as well: consumer loans, mortgages and military mortgages are some of the products that we are actively dealing with. We have increased our figures on them practically by 40 percent, which exceeds 100 billion rubles.

The bank is developing in all areas. We are offering good products and programmes and enhancing our personnel potential. In general, we consider all еру tasks that we set before the bank to be fulfilled.

Thank you very much for your support.

Vladimir Putin: What about your relations with the Government and colleagues from other financial institutions that used to carry the brunt of the burden of supporting the state defence order?

Pyotr Fradkov: We are shifting to the format of work [with the state defence order] they are used to as commercial banks. We are doing this without any problems for the industry’s companies and this is the main thing.

In other words, for us it is important to make sure that the transfer of contracts does not create any inconveniences or changes for the branch or a company because the state defence order must be fulfilled, there should be no irregularities and control must be established. We have provided for this format of work with our colleagues from commercial banks.

Of course, the Government supports us and all the necessary laws and acts of delegated legislation are being adopted. We enjoy support from the Bank of Russia as regards these regulations that allow us as a bank to conduct actively this work.

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