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#18 - JRL 7265
Vremya Novostei
July 25, 2003
EXCESS WEIGHT
Five ministries will lose 26 functions
Abolition of surplus government functions continues
Author: Vera Sitnina
[from WPS Monitoring Agency, www.wps.ru/e_index.html]

THE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT MINISTRY IS COMPILING NEW PROPOSALS ON ABOLISHING SURPLUS FUNCTIONS CURRENTLY PERFORMED BY FIVE FEDERAL MINISTRIES AND DEPARTMENTS: THE ANTI-MONOPOLY POLICY MINISTRY, INTERIOR MINISTRY, FOREIGN MINISTRY, INDUSTRY AND SCIENCE MINISTRY, AND FEDERAL SECURITIES COMMISSION.

By August 5, the Economic Development Ministry is supposed to come up with new proposals on abolishing surplus functions currently performed by five federal ministries and departments: the Anti- Monopoly Policy Ministry, Interior Ministry, Foreign Ministry, Industry and Science Ministry, and Federal Securities Commission. The ministry expects the recently formed commission for administrative reforms to take over from then on.

Deputy Economic Development Minister Mikhail Dmitriyev believes that abolition of the following functions will benefit business the most. The Interior Ministry will lose the power to suspend the operation of trade organizations when the police believe regulations and rules are being bent. Preliminary checks by the Anti-Monopoly Ministry will only apply to deals when the shares about to change hands exceed 50% of the voting stock, not 20%. Deals with balance assets are to be checked by the ministry when the sum is over 20 million times the minimal monthly wage (about 2 billion rubles), not 200,000 times the minimal monthly wage.

The Industry and Science Ministry is to be stripped of ten functions related to monitoring financial-industrial groups. According to the law on financial-industrial groups, it is this ministry that established then, sent auditors, demanded information on their operations, and could even disband them.

The commission will apparently deal with surplus functions and powers more energetically. It is clear, however, that state officials will object to and resist the idea of restricting the government to eight ministries only.

According to Dmitriyev, all ministries and departments are in the process of legitimizing their functions these days. Five have already completed the job. The Agriculture Ministry, for example, came up with a report 3,000 pages long. Dmitriyev is convinced that all this information will make things much easier for the commission, particularly in the second phase, when simple cuts give way to administrative division of functions of state regulation and control.

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