russian ruble devaluation undertaken two months ago hasn't stopped the process collation still it helped secure a three billion dollar bailout from the russian led konami community faun. is also seeking up to a billion dollars from the international norms reformed. welcome to spotlight hello. i mean the purpose of your current visit to moscow is to take part in this business for each you poor on the customs union and the coming economic space. the. economic integration of the three states. stan and russia you said recently. if it's a customs union in the coming economic space this means that many factories should go beyond conventional cooperation let's integrate their companies to manufacture

new products. what is this statement backed by any specific proposals from delhi reuss you are planning to put forward. as. i wish the business well you know usually economic factors that force politicians to make certain decisions. such as decisions on integration. but in our case it's vice versa the business of the earth which we have politicians creating the framework for the businesses to work and. of mrs business also and this is why this time we agreed to have this forum together with business community i mean that's because we don't want to just talk about a common economic space and a business so set some objectives at the level of governments only. we would like to hear. what the business men who are three countries have to say. the most so i

think we need this harmony and we'll do our best you can bind the business initiatives on the one hand and government proposals on the other in a harmonious way and the governments of course should do their part and create favorable conditions for a businessman. who was going for those loaded with the. deliberate a. month ago there was president and xander look at. their thirty's are prepared to shut off international trade in case the economic situation deteriorates because said i quote if it comes to disaster if you shut down the border in consumer goods when you go out and quote i talked to some people from bill today in the tell me that this is already happening and that lots of domestically produced goods are known sailing bellows. would you explain how this kind of policy agrees with the commitments bellew's has assumed as

a member of. the coming economic space as well as its obligations to europe. i think you're cool ting the president out of context and six i believe we are beyond the point of no return in terms of the integration process the good strong i mean you can't back out of it we need to go on. and our relations including. should be based on mutual respect and those we haven't inviolate in you are all blue means that we have fair competition and we have use of all the three states especially russian gets could a little for sale in our markets. for our trade with other countries. we did introduce some restrictions due to serious price. and by the way even a big. very grateful for that. because this kind of tree

is that when people but them bring boots across the border in the trunk of their cars but it has a negative effect on a regular tree. and they only need to do is just follow the rules. we're not keeping anybody away from our market you know we're not giving any one advantage is so over others. but if we work within the green means that we have something to in the put that would be to come including all the measures that we're taking on the consumer market. as far as i know leave russia to be the main reason behind bill reese current economic troubles. as we know the prices have increased two fold which people can't buy foreign currency and so forth as a russian while i feel quite hurt to hear that people have a brotherly nation in russia for their hardships which is this opinion really out

there into what extent is moscow to blame. well i don't want to pass judgment or make accusations. because what the price is for goods imported from russia are going up much faster than the prices for goods we exported to russia is a fact. and it's not like the prices have gone up by ten or twenty percent for they have doubled and tripled. let's take gas prices for example which they have gone up by four hundred fifty percent of the over the past five years. the belorussian export prices have only grown by twenty five to thirty percent over the same period. immediately both are for for our treaty with russia to balance out that we need to step up our export volumes. and i admit that some of it is our fault. we see that the capacity of the russian market is he just knowledge is the

common market over the three countries as well that the capacity allows us to ramp up export volumes but in order for that to happen in companies the businessmen should work harder and promote the russian exports. alone and we will encourage our businessmen to play a more active rule in the privatization process and dollars but i have to say that there is a lot of talk on a subject but we don't see any progress and we don't seem practical solutions sit on issues through it with this shit but i think the worst thing that can happen is if this integration takes place on paper on the e.u. boy and the ball much that we need russian companies to participate in the privatization process in belarus. we are really opening up our economy there but with the end we will create favorable conditions for our partners from the customs

union first and foremost and up the worth of people were to it but notice the more things when you speak about privatization use the future tense start on a large scale on the left with the thought this lead through it's already under way if in the end it's proceeding at a good pace. in their furniture industry for example we have sold almost all our furniture factories by now though no clown fortunately none of the buyers were russian businessmen are also. upon any number of other western companies are actually building new production facilities and. i think russian businesses should help with them. though not as for the metal industry we do have something offers from russian companies dear but we also have a lot of offers coming in from western europe. so i think it's time for us to move on and proceed from assessing and considering. situation there too taking some

practical steps. but at the moment our evaluation commissions are working on two projects mas cars and microelectronics we would like to have a mosque operation with a russian businessman in this area. we have a fairly strong microelectronics industry. in the past well most of its products were used in the defense industry but it's there in the beloved and i think in the future we should pay more attention to the needs of word defense industry because there can be no innovation with a book without a strong defense industry. and you would get the what's all of us with says mikhail nestico they should the prime minister. spotlight will be back shortly after the break so stay with us the.

first tree removal cold clear cut. second explosives are used to blast to go deeper than the there's a. third the remains are removed by machinery. finally the unborn had soil is deposited in vallecito. on a. welcome

back to spotlight. and just a reminder that my guest on the show today is. the prime minister of. the. cause which or we're talking about privatization and you told me it is well underway and delivery and you expected to expand further what you would like to call greece in statements by president lukashenko he said and i quote three things are expected from villages today that we will sell our state assets for some they will withdraw the social obligations that we have assumed before people and that will give up our sovereignty but i was going to be clear we will never do that and . any other codes of these words have a broader context to them that we see that the president is emotional and very specific as usual do you think these words mean that he doesn't want russian investors to participate in the privatization of deliberation companies a little bit but it's still no i don't think so it's lower cost think what he means

is that it's the privatization should be fair and transparent it doesn't you said earlier was furniture industry has been sold out entirely but none of it to russians right simple i'll tell you honestly everybody buys. the most affordable among quality products. as well i don't see that we have completely eliminated state ownership from the french industry but it will help to auction for furniture companies in a row in the end indeed the buyers are not from russia and we have sold some four or five furniture factories to probably told bill a problem. we are still holding a large portfolio don't stake seen very senior streets including furniture so there is still room when you're welcome maybe in the promised land was but it was let's take the. chemistry accept it with me and i'm planning to bring it up to date form for example for oil has been assessing our polar and surprise part of the enough

time history grew for well over two and a half years we'd like them to finally make up their mind as we also have other offers waiting list. we have certainly granted the right zero first bid. but our pure will kill him with a new and i believe there are also vast opportunities for partnership in areas such as the defense industry microelectronics information technologies and other setters . for instance military center russia law i don't produce enough pharmaceuticals domestically and i believe you could be worthwhile if we tried to pool our resources and create an industrial venture to reproduce medicines rather than keep you know porting them. of course it would be impossible to manufacture it tens of thousands of brand pharmaceutical products we could produce most of these.

combine after it was more of them rather than clinging to the existing production facilities set up new transnational corporations from scratch is something that we unfortunately don't have stead. of dividing and trading assets that were created a long time ago. so i think we should really start building something from scratch the. pressure of finance. is also criticized i mean you must have noticed that it's a very popular trend in russia these days he's criticizing. his premier to criticize your government imports restricting measures rigid price regulation indeed some money too. even said. is merely suppressing the disease is letting it fester deep down does the russian government loans that you've been promised

commitments to adjust your economic policies is there such conditionality is this part of the work for the future that you've mentioned that of course. while as far as the current trend of criticizing belarus is concerned it's a go by the billion dollar reuss we deal with our own shortcomings in the first place and try to criticize ourselves. as some people prefer to criticise others can often turn to get their own problems focused on the problem and i'm in no position to judge here and i believe there are plenty of sensible people including policymakers almost this year cool sort this out with the russians also like to reproach themselves it's something we have in common. yes well. as for the negative developments facing our foreign exchange market they are primarily due to the fact that are important volumes our exports by seven to eighty billion dollars

so when we say that we should live within our means this is one of the implications to us. in by the way mr bush has strongly recommended that we should team our appetites with regard to imports and it is stipulated in the loan conditions for the us obviously if you're going to do that we are told to use monitoring instruments such as exchange rates regulation among others. therefore you are rigorously keeping in line with the course of action we have agreed upon in our respective commitments. in this. issue there's more criticism aimed at you that at this time coming from the world bank's country director for ukraine belarus and mr. martin advisor he said quote this by the social achievements of past years economic model has exhausted its possibilities so

i was nativity agree with this statement listen in would you agree that belief does need to be more up to date and should liberalize both economically and politically liberal is that say even be. with progress and first of all we strongly adhere to our stated commitment to developing a socially responsible market economy they should learn from them and therefore when regulating privatization and all we're seeing it change your phone or ship but it's mean that we do seek to ensure that new owners abide by their social partnership commitments. we cannot agree to being made secondary to the object to both generating a profit. more from what we need is harmonization in between social and market policies or probably a mess with the assertion that the bill or its model has exhausted itself which. i think this statement he's neither entirely correct more appropriate. life and

poses certain adjustments. alter indeed we need to open up our economy to a greater extent. we need to invite more foreign investors lose the most and they actually do approach us these days we're getting numerous offers out of our european and american businesses. and so even though we still don't get as much foreign direct investment in the belarus economy as we would like to see. those foreign investment you know first five months of this year he's already had all of the annual investment volume of the new four thousand and ten. therefore we are bolstering these developments here. and the measures taken by the president and the government to reduce. specifically aimed at

promoting and enabling environment for foreign investors but no progress so that we would have new homeowners coming to our country and i thought along with new technologies and new management it is slowing me to smoke them and that you can then make huge i don't know that much about economics. but from what i read i get an impression that. unless you get the i.m.f. loan that you're hoping for it will inevitably default on its foreign debt. is that correct but i would this loan really mean everything to you. first our external debt is not that big and the meanest that any kind of missed can tell you that you've heard it's a good egypt almost almost it's not like we are facing a crisis. some sort of an insurmountable difficulty because of the foreign debt that we've accumulated over time. new our debt amounts to about maybe two or three

months over our export revenues of how much is that. well our x. or trillion years for the first five months. of sixteen billion dollars. our dad stands at nine billion total get. over we have to pay it all at once. application for the i am affluent is concerned that we need contact them above mentioned the figure in the well we think it should be three maybe a seven point five billion dollars. of course this is next to nothing compared to the bailouts that the international community including the our math school provides for some e.u. countries that are facing difficulties because of the crisis. and certain post cross is still. probably about this one so far problem it's just

a way for us to some money for a short period in order to stabilize completely stabilize the currency for all sectors polish. already greek culture is doing well but we have enough foreign currency to take care of our production needs. we do have some difficulties providing foreign currency for a net importer of. companies that don't export and i think that only imported goods here or less. we have practically no need of intervention with our currency exchange offices. we can work with the currency that people sell to the banks and buy from the banks. suffice it to say that over the past few months people have been selling and proximately. in an eighteen to two hundred twenty million dollars

a month but. the same amount of business in the book. i mean all of dollar and this is quite a substantial figure for bellary with its population of nine and a half million people. or with so we hope that within the next few months we will be able to stabilize the currency rates and meet the demands of our economic agents and the people of belarus. you've compared their loans provided for you and for simply you can treat it they think this can pierce in a bit further. have you ever compared the current situation and deliver this situation see in greece portugal their economic situation is extremely difficult. as yet we should say that the situation in believe is better or worse yet. can tell you all fish really well the situation in the. those countries at least as

far as i know facing as systemic crisis what we have it's not a crisis it's just some difficulties in certain sectors of our economy. but these difficulties don't affect the manufacturing industries or our social commitments. those areas are working totally as they should. we have economic growth the government provides funds for all the social programs which we have a slight budget surplus. surplus not deficit. by the way those are the obligations that we assumed together with our common economic space. to get this saloon or yeah from the. questions fond you could. just go for it my final question and another quote of yours speaking about selling the bill trying. to set a quote no problem the well being is to have billion dollars you can have it

tomorrow if you like we want to deal with this they would include natural gas prices that's what we are currently working on our end quote so are you making progress in your talks with gazprom to fleece gazprom willing to budge on the issue of prices. what happens here sometimes is a sort of misinterpretation but if people think that selling the remaining fifty percent of the bill trance gas that they were you know wanted to be able to pay domestic prices or at least to get a special price screens prince in reality there this is our principled position that we have made this decision incidentally this was a russia's initiative and our which is. also what we are saying is that we need a clear pricing formula for natural gas for a longer term. how do you turn. in the process ship idiot we think that at the end of the day when we should arrive at an equal profitability for you those days to me

we realize of course that this can't happen overnight which we all i mean both belarus and russia we all should know that the gypsy in three years all prices will be at the same level problem world and so spicy with thank you very much for being with us and just a reminder that my guest on the show today was knee high heel nestle called h. the prime minister of belarus and that's it for now for all of us here spotlights will be back with more personnel comments all of what's going on. outside of russia as the lead stay in the party and take care.

program arctics media empire abandons its bid to take over britain's largest satellite broadcaster as a frenzy over newspaper hacking consumes politicians and police. divers are set to make a final attempt to find twenty four of the kims of russia's pleasure cruiser disaster there are still missing. the owner of the company that rented the boat daria for its final voyage under state shipping it said it was fit to sail have been arrested we'll bring you all the details in just a moment. and to washington where russia lays out a new step by step strategy towards iran that may bring to iran back to the negotiating table over its nuclear program. this is r.t.

coming to live from moscow i'm marina joshua into the program rupert murdoch's embattled media empire news corp has announced that it's dropping its bid to take control of britain's largest settle i broadcast or the move is intended to head off public outrage over allegations that several of his newspapers were gaged and rampant phone hacking scandal has grown to include the british government and police officials who stand accused of complicity and corruption across the atlantic shocked us senators are calling for a probe into allegations that nine eleven victims were also targeted by murdoch's newspapers but as artie's lorimer the reports the media mogul's rise over the decades offered plenty of warning signs over what was to come. rupert murdoch's push to expand in british media has come to a halt public and political rage over thirteen hacking has forced news corp to drop its bid to buy satellite broadcaster b. sky b. but some say he's already killed the british press and they were saying it as far

back as one thousand nine hundred eighty one that's when he went on a media spending spree and bought amongst others the world renowned times newspaper news international has been playing a toxic part of our public life for so long but it worked under his ownership circulation just kept on rising in a market that killed off others and sky t.v. a loss making and tips cure satellite network rocketed to become the biggest player in the u.k.'s pay t.v. market i do admire rupert murdoch because he's a risk taker when he bought the times and sunday times of london the newspaper business was absolutely in peril in the u.k. mostly because of the unions and because of some other economic factors he turned that around. basically there are people who will say that he saved the newspaper industry in london because of the whopping revolution in one thousand nine hundred six but now it's clear that success came with a heavy price tag morality.