OREANDA-NEWS. April 02, 2013. Sberbank has signed an agreement with RusHydro to provide banking support for the construction of energy plants in Eastern Russia. The agreement has been signed by both parties to ensure maximum transparency in spending the budgetary funds invested by the state to the authorized capital of JSC "RusHydro" for financing the construction of four new power generation facilities.

The four facilities are – CHP (combined heat and power plant) in Sovetskaya Gavan, Sakhalin State district power plant-2 (Phase 1), Yakutsk State district power plant-2 (Phase 1), Blagoveshensk CHP (Phase 2). The total financing for the facilities is 50 billion rubles. A recapitalization of RusHydro was adopted by a presidential decree on 22 November 2012 for the purposes of the energy development in East Russia.

Under the terms of the agreement Sberbank will provide a range of banking support for the construction of the Far Eastern facilities. In particular, a separate bank account will be opened for each participant in a construction (customer, customer's subsidiaries and affiliates, main contractor, subcontractor), and from this account calculations for the construction, installation, and other contract activities will be made.

The bank will appoint an independent engineering company to perform a pricing and technology audit, as well as provide an analysis of the technical solutions implemented for the project. All payments for work performed will be made upon a completion.

Reports on the expenditure of resources from separate bank accounts of the construction participants will be generated on a monthly basis in order to provide timely provision of information to the Government of the Russian Federation, the Russian Ministry of Energy and the Ministry of Economic Development of Russia on the implementation of the projects.

Bella Zlatkis, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank, commented: “Sberbank of Russia has considerable experience in providing banking support to major investment projects. This is a pilot project requiring complex banking support that will allow for increased efficiency including the involvement of the engineering company”.

Eugeny Dod, Chairman of the Management Board of JSC “RusHydro”, said: “The agreement with Sberbank is critical in allowing the state to continuously assess and evaluate the progress of the projects, to review the effectiveness of capital investments and to monitor the purpose-oriented use of resources received. We also plan to create an additional, internal corporate control circuit of the implementation of our Far Eastern construction sites. In order to do this, RusHydro has already formed its own monitoring system. All these measures will ensure maximum transparency and full control for the state, other shareholders and other parties concerned in the implementation of these strategically important infrastructure projects”.