Auditors: Russian Railways fails to stick to investment deadlines

MOSCOW, Apr 11 (PRIME) -- The Audit Chamber has discovered that Russian Railways failed to comply with the deadlines on almost all investment projects and reach planned results, the service said in a statement on Thursday.

“The Audit Chamber monitored implementation of Russian Railways’ investment projects, including the projects financed through the federal budget. In the bulk of these projects, facilities were not commissioned on time and planned figures were not reached,” the statement read.

From 2016 through 2020, Russian Railways delayed launches of 13 facilities out of 22 under a project to develop the Mezhdurechensk–Taishet railway. Eight facilities are technically ready by less than 50%, and works on three more facilities have not yet even begun. Construction of a second track and sorting stations at the railway to ports of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov are in a similar situation, the authority said.

The company also had to construct 11 passing loops and 78 kilometers of additional rail tracks as it develops the Baikal-Amur Mainline and the Trans-Siberian Railway in 2018, but commissioned only one facility last year. In addition to that, the unused budget money that the government injected into Russian Railways jumped by 50% in 2018 to more than 52 billion rubles as of January 1, 2019.

(64.7373 rubles – U.S. $1)

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