Pulp Gets Authorities Involved

The authorities of Leningrad Region will help Vyborg Pulp Ltd. to buy a back part of the business until the end of the year. This land is planned to use as collateral to obtain credit.

The president of the Vyborg Pulp, Alexei Kazmin reported that VTB had promised to give the company about 1 billion rubles. These funds are requested to send to the modernization of production, which will increase the capacity of the enterprise by 50% to about 140 thousand tons of paper per year. Moreover, the loan funds are necessary to replenish the revolving fund of the enterprise. However, according to Kazmin, this year VTB gave only 600 million rubles of the promised 1 billion rubles. After that, all negotiations on the remaining amount were delayed. He thought that putting the plant land in pledge would be collateral to provide the remaining 400 million rubles.

Vyborg Pulp Ltd. leases an area of about 12 hectares. The company owed the district authorities for more than 70 million rubles in rent (the amount owed for the previous year). As Vice-Governor of the Leningrad Region, Alexander Drozdenko explained, if a plant bought out a site, it would have to pay for it only the land tax, which is approximately half the size of the rent. Buy the station will be on concessional terms – about 20 million rubles.

Notably, the administration of the Vyborg Region delays the sale of the site. Initially, local officials said that more than a half of the site is in special conservation zone and it can not be redeemed. However, after the changed federal law, such a purchase became possible. According to provincial officials, local authorities do not want to lose the income from rent in their budget.

But business has finally been able to attract an administrative resource: the Governor of Leningrad region Valery Serdyukov vowed Vyborg Pulp Ltd. an assist in obtaining the site for the current year.

Informational resource:
Catherine Fomicheva, dp.ru