Sergei Ivanov's opening remarks:

Today we are holding this year's first meeting of the Government Commission for Transport and Communications, and we have only one item on the agenda, but it is rather important. Here's what it says: "Government programme to create hi-tech technoparks in the Russian Federation."

We have explicitly agreed to consider this issue separately, because it is obvious that this programme is supposed to become one of the most effective instruments for implementing the resolutions of the country's leaders intended to modernise the Russian economy.

I want to draw your attention to the fact that when the programme was initially conceived several years ago, technoparks were supposed to serve as infrastructure for developing information technology. However, what we call the area of application has turned out to be broader in reality.

Now we have technoparks that house companies in the field of biomedical technology, mechanical engineering, electronic and chemical industries.

On the whole, I think that it is not at all bad that technoparks' focus has been slightly redefined. In fact, this is a definite advantage, because technoparks should become places where the most advanced and innovative things are created, from which our domestic know-how will gradually spill over into all branches of the economy, i.e., the real sector of economy.

Due to the importance of technoparks, the process for establishing them is tightly monitored by the Government and our Commission. We have already discussed this several times.

Let us recall that nine regions were included in the programme in 2006. These are the Moscow Region, St Petersburg, the Nizhny Novgorod Region, the Kaluga Region, the Republic of Tatarstan (where, by the way, I recently visited a very successful technopark that is already operational. Everything is working well there, as I was able to see for myself), the Tyumen Region, the Novosibirsk Region, the Kemerovo Region and the Republic of Mordovia. As I have already said, we also have seen positive results, and not only in Tatarstan. In the Tyumen Region, for example, a conventional technopark is already operational.

There are also examples that I would describe as average. The right kind of activity is going on, but it is, shall we say, shaky. This includes Mordovia and the Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk and Kemerovo Regions. And in three regions, namely St Petersburg, the Moscow Region and the Kaluga Region, development of the corresponding technical documentation is still not finished, and they haven't even gotten the ball rolling yet.

Therefore, after our Commission's meeting last spring and the subsequent investigation into the development of these technoparks, the Government has decided to freeze all federal co-financing in 2009-2010. Remember that in the three aforementioned regions, the development of technoparks is co-financed, instead of being 100% funded by the federal government.

As for the other, more successful technoparks, our plans for them have objectively had to be revised due to the economic downturn, but not fundamentally.

Accordingly, today we will discuss the possibility of extending this state programme and carefully consider new proposals regarding its new parameters, including acting on some new regions' requests to join it. We have had such requests from a variety of regions, but nevertheless, we should base our decisions on the realities of the budgetary process and the funds that we have, allowing for some re-distributions of funds, especially at the expense of those who have done nothing at all during that time. At the same time, we should not increase federal budget funding for this programme.