Zee Beam News

January 11, 2009 - Financial Times by Isabel Gorst - Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, on Sunday took another apparent swipe at Vladimir Putin, rebuking the prime minister’s government for moving too slowly to alleviate the country’s economic crisis. Mr Medvedev said only 30 per cent of the government’s anti-crisis programme drafted last October had been fulfilled. “We have to acknowledge that at the present moment planned measures are being fulfilled more slowly than expected and, most important, more slowly than the current situation demands,” Mr Medvedev said at a meeting at the Salyut engine plant outside Moscow. Most Russians had believed Mr Medvedev would play second fiddle to Mr Putin, who named him as his chosen successor ahead of presidential elections last year. Although several attempts by Mr Medvedev to pursue independent policies have been thwarted, Kremlin watchers have noted a new assertiveness in the president of late. In comments last month that were seen as a signal to Mr Putin, the president said: “The final responsibility for what happens in the country and for the important decisions taken would rest on my shoulders alone and I would not be able to share this responsibility with anyone.” Mr Medvedev used Sunday’s meeting to cite a series of dismal economic indicators, including a 6 per cent drop in Russian industrial output in the final quarter of last year and a sharp drop in global commodities prices, which has hit the resource-based economy hard. He was speaking after Russia’s central bank allowed the rouble to depreciate against the dollar/euro basket and published data revealing that it had almost doubled currency market interventions in December to stem a slide in the rouble. The rouble fell 1.1 per cent to 30.5 to the dollar at the start of trading on Sunday, in the 13th mini-depreciation since November 11. However, the rouble rose slightly against the euro, to 41.2 from its close at 41.4 on December 30. The central bank sold $57.4bn and €12.6bn to buoy the rouble in December, compared with $30.1bn and €2.9bn in November. In all the rouble has lost more than 20 per cent of its value since reaching a peak last August, before the war with Georgia and the onset of the financial crisis, which triggered capital flight from Russia. Aleksey Ulyukaev, the deputy head of the Russian central bank, admitted he was under pressure from Russian bankers to sanction a one-off sharp devaluation to restore the balance of payments and halt the drain on reserves. But he defended the central bank’s slow depreciation policy on Sunday, saying a one-off devaluation would destroy confidence. “If we allowed ourselves to do such a thing we would have to start rebuilding our credit history all over again,” he told the Russian business daily Vedomosti.