From: Justin Burke (JBurke@sorosny.org)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 09:18:15 EDT
Armenia describes planned handover of power plant to Russia as "shady"
Excerpt from Ayk Gevorkyan's report by Armenian newspaper Aykakan
Zhamanak on 7 April, entitled "One more shady deal"
After it became clear in January that Armenia will not be able to
procure any more nuclear fuel from Russia because of debts, the
authorities took an unpredictable decision: they decided to restart,
without re-fuelling, the nuclear power plant which had not been used for
several months.
The new load of nuclear fuel was expected to arrive in April. Until then
the Armenian nuclear power plant [ANPP] was expected to use the fuel it
had which naturally means functioning at half of its capacity. It is
already April. The Energy Ministry told us that they were planning to
shut down the plant for re-fuelling in the middle of April. But the
problem is that no contract has yet been signed with Russia on fuel
supplies.
The hydropower plant of the Sevan-Razdan cascade was expected to be
handed over to Russia for financial management. In exchange for that
Russia is expected to take responsibility for repaying some 40m US
dollars debt for the fuel it has already received and the fuel which
will be given in April
- 25m US dollars.
On top of that Russia is expected to repay a German credit of 21m
dollars given for repairs of the hydropower plant. In short, Russia is
taking responsibility for repaying 46m US dollars of Armenia's debt.
This deal can be described as a very strange and shady one.
[Passage omitted: details of the deal]
From the economic point of view the deal seems extremely favourable for
Armenia and unfavourable for Russia. Naturally a question arises: why
does Russia agree to that? On the whole the authorities have thrown a
blanket of secrecy over the deal and it is impossible to get any
official reports on that. Officials are making general remarks, which
reveal nothing: "Today talks were held and a package of agreements will
be presented for discussion in future." According to unofficial sources,
the talks are about to fail as the parties disagree on some of the
important points.
[Passage omitted: describes it as a political deal]
Source: Aykakan Zhamanak, Yerevan, in Armenian 7 Apr 03 p3
BBC Mon TCU 070403 gc/ah
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