St Petersburg to issues RUB 25 bln worth of bonds to finance motorway.

ST. PETERSBURG, May 16 (Itar-Tass) -- St. Petersburg will issue
infrastructure bonds worth 25 billion roubles to finance the construction
of the Western high-speed motorway, St. Petersburg's governor Valentina
Matviyenko said on Saturday.
According to Matviyenko, the move is called to attract private
investments against government guarantees. The city government took the
decision to this effect after consultations with the Russian Finance
Ministry.
The high-speed toll motorway construction project in St. Petersburg
was planned to be finance by both the state and private investors under a
concession agreement, although currently it is finance by the state only.
Private financing is hampered by the global economic crisis. The first
section of the road, from the ring road junction to the 3rd and 4th sea
port districts, has already been put into operation, and the second
section is planned to be commissioned by the end of 2010. In all, the road
is planned to be constructed in five stages, and private investments are
needed to proceed.
According to the city governor, results of the tender for
participation in the concession agreement will be announced this year.
"There are two contenders for participation in the construction concession
agreement, and we will choose the city's partner by the end of the year,"
she said.
The city's biggest infrastructure project worth more than 212 billion
roubles was launched in 2005. The motorway will run along the western side
of the Vasilyevsky island, across the city's Primorsky, Vybrogsky and
Kurortny districts to link St. Petersburg's sea port, via the ring road,
to federal highways to Moscow, Russian regions, Baltic and Scandinavian
countries. The total length of the motorway will be 46.4 kilometers, with
overpasses accounting for half of its length.

.Nord Stream starts pipe-laying in Germany's Lubmin.

BERLIN, May 16 (Itar-Tass) -- The Nord Stream consortium started the
laying of first pipes on the Baltic Sea bottom from the East German city
of Lubmin on Saturday. The works are scheduled to be over by October 2011.
The official start to the construction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline
was given from the German side on April 15 in the Lubmin city near
Greifswald on the Baltic Sea coast. The works proceed on a land plot of
five hectares along the sea coast. A total of 82 kilometers of pipes will
run through the German economic zone, some 47 kilometers of which will be
laid in a four-meter deep trench to allow easy passage of big vessels near
the Usedom island.
The world's two biggest pipe-laying vessels, Italian-made Castoro-9
and Castoro-10 capable of laying 500 meters of pipes a day, will join the
works in late June.
The works in Russia's Portovaya Bay outside Vyborg started on April 9.
According to preliminary estimates, the pipe-laying project will cost 7.4
billion euros. A total of 102,750 pipe sections made of four-centimetre
thick steel sheets will be laid on the Baltic Sea bottom. Each segment of
12 meters in length has the diameter of 120 centimetres.

.Belarus, Tatarstan PMs launch Belarusian tractor production in
Yelabuga.

YELABUGA, May 16 (Itar-Tass) -- Belarusian Prime Minister Sergei
Sidorsky, who is staying in Tatarstan on a two-day visit, and Tatarstan's
Prime Minister Ildar Khalikov on Saturday attended the launching ceremony
of the production line for the Belarus heavy-duty tractors in Tatarstan's
Yelabuga.
"The joint venture of the Minsk Tractor Plant and Tatarstan's YeLAZ
company is located on the territory of the MTZ-YelAZ Trading House. The
Belarusian side holds 51 percent of the share capital, and the Tatar side
- 49 percent," the company's deputy director general Rashit Salikhov told
Itar-Tass.
The new plant will produce 2,000 tractors a year. "The capacity is
twice as much as that of the Minsk Tractor Plant's joint venture in St.
Petersburg," Sidorsky said during the launching ceremony, adding that this
plant will manufacture tractors that might "replace three or four ordinary
machines, which are in high demand among farmers."
According to the Belarusian prime minister, the new plant's capacity
will be brought up to 5,000 tractors a year.
Sidorsky's two-day visit to Tatarstan was crowned by signing an
agreement on broader economic cooperation in the areas of oil and
petrochemical industries, in agricultural machinery production, and in the
sphere of high technologies. It is planned to regain the pre-recession
trade turnover between Belarus and Tatarstan already in 2010.
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