Putin puts together team for economic reforms

Putin puts together team for economic reforms
DADAN UPADHYAY

MOSCOW, MARCH 31: President-elect Valadimir Putin has formed a coordinating team, consisting of three top Kremlin officials, to speed up work on his economic programme, being drafted by the Centre for Strategic Studies, a Russian think-tank headed by German Gref.

The Kremlin team includes Putin's chief of staff Alexander Voloshin, First Deputy Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov and First Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin.

Kasyanov and Kudrin are tipped for the posts of Russia's Prime Minister and Finance Minister, respectively in the new Cabinet, which will be announced after Putin's swearing-in in early May.

The experts from the Centre for Strategic Research, working on the programme, include Mikhail Krasanov, INDEM think-tank, Oleg Vyugin, Troika Dialog, Alexei Ulyukov and Sergei Sinelnikov, Gaidar Institute, Arkady Dvorkovich, Economic Expert Group and Mikhail Dmitriyev, Carnegie Foundation.

The 300 page economic programme, for the next four years, will be ready by May 20. The programme, Putin's first statement on his fiscal and social policy, is expected to be a ``mixed bag,'' expressing ``genuine commitment to reform,'' Kremlin officials said.

Putin has vowed to combat poverty and tackle social problems, warning Russia's influential ``oligarchs'' linked with `` Yeltsin family'' that their acess to the levers of power will be done away with. But his statements about stronger state control have made foreign investors nervous, analysts claim.

On Thursday, Gref told mediapersons that Putin's economic programme would ``dispace'' that of former mentor Boris Yeltsin, in many ways, but he emphasised that the government was now more willing to take an aggressive stance toward its political foes and was more united.

Gref said that reform plans would be coordinated so that they were not in conflict with one another.