Having congratulated the captain of the fishing vessel Kalkan Mikail Galakhin on Fishermen's Day, Vladimir Putin asked him how about his work. Mr Galakhin said that his crew fishes for sole and that currently everything is going well.
At the same time, Mr Galakhin drew Mr Putin's attention to a number of issues associated with the industry's organisation in Russia and raised the question of improving working conditions for Russian fishermen and in the fishing industry as a whole.
During Mr Putin's phone call, the Kalkan was out fishing in the Pacific Ocean. The Kalkan is one of the long-liners whose crew could not go to sea for a long time due to serious problems associated with wage arrears.
Ships such as the Kalkan were built in the 1990s by a Cypriot company using a loan from a German bank. Later, the company could not meet its obligations to repay the loan and Vnesheconombank assumed creditor's rights. Since fishing in ships under foreign flags was prohibited in Russia on January 1, 2009, the flotilla and the crews of these vessels have been left without work. After they wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister, the government reviewed issue several times. Finally, under instructions from Mr Putin and through the efforts of the Federal Agency for Fishery and Vnesheconombank, the vessels were registered under the Russian flag.
Currently seven of the 12 vessels are in operation; they have been granted catch quotas and are fishing. Five are still in the harbor.
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Prime Minister Vladimir Putin congratulates fish industry workers on the occasion of their professional holiday, Fishermen's Day.
The message reads, in part:
"Workers of the Russian fishing industry make a worthy contribution to achieving the country's most important development goals. Your work serves to bolster the food security of Russia and is applied towards effective use of unique biological resources, as well as progress of the national economy and creation of competitive advantages on export markets.
Your earnest efforts to implement projects of the sector's technical and technological modernisation ensure its stable growth and development."