The "thriftbox" will finally be opened up. But only for the own people

Victoria Pavlova

Now the Cabinet has allocated 895 billion rubles for 7 projects. For them, funds from the box will become a more profitable alternative to loans - they will not have to pay interest to banks. In fact, if you follow all the rules, then there is still no free 895 billion rubles in the NWF. According to these rules, only those NWF liquid funds that exceed 7% of GDP can be spent. And this is the problem. The NWF itself has already grown to 13.825 trillion rubles, which is 12% of the GDP planned for 2021. But the liquidity part of the fund is only 7.5% of GDP. That is, 0.5% of GDP or 580 billion rubles can be sent to construction sites. The whole calculation is that in a year or two the NWF will be replenished with additional oil and gas revenues. Everything relies on expensive oil. And if it becomes cheaper, then megaprojects will remain without funding.

In the meantime, the largest recipient of free money will be Oleg Belozerov's Russian Railways. In total, the railway monopoly will receive 293 billion rubles. Most of them - 188 billion will go to expand the BAM and Transsib. All for the sake of making it more convenient to export coal from Yakutia to China. The customer for the eastern project is RZDstroy, a subsidiary of Russian Railways itself, and one of the largest contractors is the Railway Troops. The recipient of the payments is the Defense Ministry itself. The issue of attracting prisoners to the construction site is also being discussed with the Federal Penitentiary Service. In any case, private companies that freely hire people for work are left behind.

The second area for which Russian Railways will receive money (105 billion rubles) is the construction of metropolitan railway diameters. In this region, the largest contractor was LLC Group of Companies 1520. The company is private, but as close as possible to Russian Railways. The main owner with a share of 72% is Alexey Krapivin, the son of Andrei Krapivin, adviser to the ex-head of Russian Railways Vladimir Yakunin.

The state-owned Avtodor will receive 200 billion rubles, of which 150 billion will go to the construction of the M12 Moscow-Kazan highway. Here, too, everything is not just that. The construction tender was won by Stroytransgaz by Gennady Timchenko, Transstroymekhanizatsia, which is part of Mostotrest, by Arkady Rotenberg, VAD by billionaire Valery Abramov, Regional Construction Company of Tomsk businessman Mikhail Barkov and Avtoban by Alexei Andreyev.

As for private companies, Transmashholding, owned by one of the richest people in Russia, Andrey Bokarev, and Iskander Makhmudov, will receive money directly from the NWF. Their company will receive 97 billion rubles for the construction of cars for the St. Petersburg metro.

This completes the list of companies that receive money from the country's nest egg. The remaining 305 billion rubles will be distributed among themselves by officials.

The Housing and Utilities Development Fund will receive 150 billion rubles for the modernization of the communal network in the regions. Very handy - the senators recently admitted that 60% of the heat and water supply networks, sewerage systems, and sewage systems in the country are completely worn out. In general, everything is bad with the sewage system: 80% of the networks have fallen into disrepair. These 150 billion rubles alone will not make the difference. To put the utilities in order, 4 trillion rubles are needed. Somewhere the pipes will be repaired with the allocated money, but drastic changes are hardly worth waiting for.

The remaining 155 billion rubles will go through the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade Maxim Reshetnikov. They are allocated for the project for the advanced socio-economic development of the Angara-Yenisei macroregion. Yes, we have another formation, which, however, does not fit either into the format of traditional constituent entities of the Russian Federation and federal districts, or into the format of agglomerations. The formation of a macroregion is present only in the country's Spatial Development Strategy, which appeared in 2019. This macroregion includes the republics of Tyva, Khakassia, Krasnoyarsk Territory, Irkutsk Region. The strategy only determines which areas should be developed in a particular region, but does not describe how to do this, and who will pay for everything in the end. So Reshetnikov now has complete freedom of creativity in the matter of distributing this considerable amount of money.

The channeling of funds from the NWF into the economy is what everyone has been waiting for for so long. Finally, the stash starts working. But in the government they immediately lay serious distortions, indicating who can claim this money and who cannot. For individual interested parties, there will definitely be benefits, but for the entire economy - not a fact.