vlad.tribnet.com / Issue #146 / Business / Reading article...

The revival of the Trans Siberian railway, announced by the Russian government a month ago, faces serious hardships and leaves experts involved pessimistic.

“It is impossible to revive the dead,” said Svetlana Kotelnikova, the head of the cargo department of the Far Eastern Railway.

Now there is only one cargo train per hour, while before perestroika it was every six minutes. Kotelnikova thinks that reducing tariffs for transit cargos by 10 percent, introduced July 1, makes the railway even less profitable than before. Of the total tariffs placed on one container that is being shipped to Europe, less than 18 percent is imposed by the railroad. The rest are port and customs tariffs.

Nevertheless, the officials plan to increase the traffic density by 25 percent by the end of this year. According to Gennady Nesov, head of the Department for Shipping, Ports, and Transport with the krai administration, the krai plans to deliver from six to eight million tons of coal from China to Primorye ports for shipment to power stations in Japan. Japan is also very interested in sending cargo to Europe and back, said Japanese consul in Vladivostok Kiyoshi Matsuzaki.

“We send very little cargo now because of the high tariffs,” he said.

Reducing the tariff is not the only thing the government is doing to attract additional foreign cargo.

As a result of privatization, all the companies involved, excluding the railroad itself, became separated, and each has its own policy.

“In the meantime we spend a lot of effort to coordinate work of different participants of the chain,” Nesov said in an interview on Mestnoye Vremya television program.

The ports are reducing their fees up to 50 percent, each cargo train will have a team of armed guards. Customs will work 24 hours a day, and the paper work will be simplified. Now cargo waits five or six days for customs clearing.

Victor Goncharenko, head of Vladivostok’s customs office refused to comment on proposals that his office work around the clock.

“We follow the customs code, which is approved by Moscow,” he said.

Grigory Artamonov, head of cargo delivery company Fetexim, said, “We won’t achieve anything until customs has a strict timetable, which everybody knows: 30 minutes for search, an hour for a forwarding company.

“If a cargo is held longer, the guilty ones, including customs, should be punished.”