Russia's Federal Fisheries Agency setting big targets for fleet renewal

Russia's Federal Fisheries Agency has set an ambitious target to create conditions for fishing fleet massive construction at domestic yards, reports www.fishnet-russia.com (www.fishnet.ru) with reference to a report delivered by Russia's fishery head Andrey Krainy.

The current condition of the Russian fishing fleet is characterized by the following indices:

• 80% out of 2448 vessels exceed their design service life;
• In 2006-2008 the fleet increased by 217 boats, of which only 4 totally new vessels, against 543 written-off vessels.

As the efficiency of operations of morally and physically worn-out fleet has been decreasing year on year, the Agency has taken it as a point to encourage construction of new ships and modernization of existing vessels. Towards that end, it has secured interest rate subsidies for the respective credits and worked out a list of issues to be solved in 2009, most of which correlate with the Government's anti-crisis measures:

• Elaborate recommendations to the commercial banks with state capital to use vessels and capture quota shares as security for credits;
• Exempt the imported onboard equipment for new shipbuildings from the VAT and duties;
• Exempt services of ship repair and building companies from the VAT in order to level out competitiveness of operations of domestic and foreign yards;
• Increase authorized capital of Rosagroleasing for the development of the federal leasing system for vessels and onboard equipment.

Even in spite of the current financial crisis implementation of these measures will allow to carry out 23 investment projects for construction and refurbishment of the vessels at a total sum of more than 12 billion RUB aimed at increasing the fish capture by 590,000 tonnes and decreasing the product cost price. The projects are supposed to create more than 2000 new jobs.