On the bad weather day last Sunday, 315 United Russia deputies were brought to the Lesniye Dali recreation center to meet with their party leader and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Putin started the meeting with compliments: “The newly elected Duma has made a good start in both the number and the quality of the laws enacted.” Apart from the United Russia deputies and their leader, the event was attended by vice premier Sergei Sobianin and First Deputy Head of the Presidential Executive Office Vladislav Surkov. Duma Speaker Boris Gryzlov noted with approval that the deputies had adopted 120 laws and would enact 15 more at the remaining two plenary sessions before recess – “the largest number of enactments ever made during a session in the Duma’s history.”
However the Prime Minister did not seem to care much about the law-making records. He reminded the participants to carry on to find solutions to the problems of the health standards, which hinder housing construction, and of small–business support, and to reduce the number of audits. In addition, the Duma should submit, before July 10, its amendments to the draft budget to be approved in fall.
But it was inflation that was the major subject of the Sunday event. Putin’s main point was that fighting inflation by means of an economic slowdown as they do in Europe was inappropriate. Neither did he recommend the way they do it in China. “In the PRC where the communist party is in power, they act strictly. They just instruct their banks not to give loans. Or they order to cut budget expenditures. I don’t think we should do the same,” he said. “We still have too many poor people in Russia without any savings,” he told the meeting and added that after consulting the Central Bank, he decided to raise civil servants’ payroll by 30%, starting on December 1, 2008. Besides, pensions would rise by 16-19%. The applause that followed was the first and the last during the meeting.
Putin’s decision is likely to trigger off new legislative initiatives. Andrei Isaev, Head of the Duma Committee for Labor and Social Policy, told Expert Online that the idea of reforming the wage scale of civil servants is coming back along with the introduction of a sector–based system.
Vera Kholmogorova
Photo: edinoros.ru
http://eng.expert.ru |
