OREANDA-NEWS. July 17, 2009. The Eighth Annual Meeting of Sovcomflot (SCF)Group Business Partners took place in St. Petersburg on 14 July 2009. This year the Meeting has been timed to coincide with the International sail training ships regatta – “Tall Ships’ Races Baltic – 2009”.

As a part of the Meeting programme, an exhibition of hi-tech ships models was arranged on board the sail training ship Mir – one of the regatta’s participants. Some of the ships in the exhibition are already operated by the company and some are still in the design phase. These vessels will provide transportation and logistical support for the major energy projects, both in Russia and abroad. Examples of these developments include the product-carriers built at the Admiralty Shipyards in St.Petersburg; the Arctic shuttle tankers, of the Vasily Dinkov type, for use in the Varandey Project in the Barents Sea; a new generation large tanker which will reduce ecological pressure in the sensitive areas of the world’s oceans, including the Baltic Sea; and an LNG tanker project for the Shtokman field. The exhibition also showed joint projects of Sovcomflot, Russian (interactive computer model of large tankers operations in the port of Ust-Luga) and Swedish companies (drillships).

The exhibition was attended by Russia’s Prime Minister, Vladimir Putin; by the Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office and Sovcomflot Board Chairman, Sergey Naryshkin; the Governor of St. Petersburg, Valentina Matviyenko; the Deputy Prime Minister, Sergey Ivanov; the Minister of Transport, Igor Levitin; and the Presidential Representatives in Federal Districts. Special attention was paid by the guests to those machinery models which can be reproduced at Russia’s shipbuilding enterprises and which are based on innovational energy and resources-saving technologies.