Privitazation Initiative - Russian Railroads

While only tangential to the linked Times article, this brief passage did raise my atterntion:

• The program approved Wednesday involves 11 companies, including the national oil company, the national railroad, a fleet of merchant marine vessels, two state banks and a company managing hydroelectric dams, said Aleksei Uvarov, the director of the property department in the ministry of economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/29/busin ... ruble.html

Further investigation finds that railroad privitatization has been addressed. Here is material from the English language Moscow Times:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/ ... 02988.html

Brief passage:

• Russia’s rail freight transport system, the third-largest in the world, is waiting for a privatization shift. A lull in reform has set in across Russia’s railroads as a whole, but it has been particularly conspicuous in the already partially liberalized freight sector that still makes up more than 70 percent of total revenue for Russian Railways, or RZD.
  
  Oil and gas pipelines aside, rail freight carries 85 percent of goods in Russia, state-owned monopoly RZD wrote recently in the prospectus for its eurobond launch. Yet the slowdown in Russian industry during the crisis meant that last year, freight turnover on Russian railroads dropped to 2,271.3 billion metric ton-kilometers from 2,423.8 billion in 2008.
  
  Now the Russian government and RZD are in a debate over what the next steps should be for the nascent liberalization of freight transport, as the sector returns to activity thanks to an improvement in the economy. To facilitate the process, the Council for Rail Operators partnership has helped set up a self-regulating organization between RZD and private companies, establishing a number of key groups “to nudge the monopoly toward its conclusion, modernize technological processes and create transparent systems of legal relations,” said Dmitry Korolyov, the council’s executive director.

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