Who owns russian railways

This investigation is part of a Reuters series examining how Russia does business in the Putin era. Even as the Russian president has denounced corruption, some members of the elite have used secretive companies, straw owners and other means to gain business worth hundreds of millions of dollars from some of his signature undertakings. The U.

He has known Putin since they were both in St. Petersburg in the s. Yakunin did not respond to Reuters inquiries regarding this story, but his spokesman at Russian Railways, which is also known by the abbreviation OAO RZhD, replied to written questions. Russian Railways said the companies identified by Reuters were all legitimate, and that its contracts were awarded fairly and fulfilled properly. Krapivin did not respond to Reuters requests for comment. Instead, his son called.

Alexei Krapivin said his father had no involvement in the railway contractors and transactions examined in this report. One day last summer, a group of young men in T-shirts and jeans stood around smoking. There was more to the town house than met the eye. When a reporter inquired at the property, a man in his 40s - head shaven, arms tattooed - came out. Asked whether the contractor, MPCenterZhat MPC , was based there, he sent for a younger man, whose hair was cropped at the sides and hung in a ponytail at back.

Reuters chose the firms because they bid for the same type of work, mainly the upgrading of track signalling and train control systems. All the 10 rail contractors examined by Reuters had accounts at STB. On the face of it, Russian Railways offers contracts to private companies in open tenders where market forces apply.

But several people familiar with the process alleged some contractors work together to win tender competitions. This is done, they said, by companies either managing to be the only bidders, or working with other bidders to decide who should win or to inflate prices. Reuters was unable to verify those claims. A Reuters analysis of tender competitions involving the 10 companies showed little attempt by bidders to compete for contracts on price.

Out of cases where the winning bid was listed, 79 were only 0. A further 35 of the winning bids were 1 percent below the maximum allowed price. The nature and activities of the 10 rail contractors were hard to pin down.

To find out more about them, Reuters went in search of their head offices. The structure contained a business centre, a car dealership, a fitness club, a beauty parlour, two bank branches, a florist and a grocery - but no sign of TSA.

A security guard there found a mention of the firm on his computer, but said the company did not have an office there. As well as their elusiveness, MPC and TSA have other striking similarities, including the fact they were set up on the same day in by the same individual and that they opened bank accounts on the same day at STB.

These overlaps were no mere coincidence, said a former manager who worked for both companies at different times in the mid s. MPC and TSA list two different people as managers in corporate filings; neither of them responded to repeated requests for comment. Deliveries under these contracts are made on time, and production was of reliable quality.

Request a demo of the EMIS service. Annual growth percentages for latest two years in local currency RUB. Absolute financial data is included in the purchased report. Net sales revenue. Rn-Trans AO. Vrk-1 AO. Transremkom OOO. Kvrz Novotrans OOO. Almost km of track has been electrified and These have focused on the development and renewal of infrastructure, principally on the major transit and export routes which carry huge volumes of cargo in the direction of the seaports of Murmansk, the Baltic Sea, the Far East, and the Black and Azov Seas.

In , for the Summer Universiade University Games , a rail line was built connecting Kazan to the international airport. In , the Novorossyisk tunnel system was reopened following reconstruction. In , the Kouznetsov tunnel was opened as part of work to rebuild the line from Komsomol-on-Amur — Sovietskaya Gavan, by which freight transits to transport hub Vanino — Sovgavanski. This work significantly boosted the rail throughput capacity.