Prime Minister Aliaksandr Turchyn expressed dissatisfaction at a meeting of the Eurasian Intergovernmental Council with the way cooperation projects are being supported within the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). According to him, applications take too long to review, the support conditions are unsatisfactory, and the projects themselves duplicate existing production facilities.
“There must be constant forward movement to steadily strengthen integration. One of the key areas in this regard is the development of industrial and agro-industrial cooperation. Since July 2024, a mechanism has been in place to finance joint industrial cooperation projects. By agreement of the parties, the project is being implemented on a pilot basis for a period of five years.
Two years of practical implementation have shown that this instrument has not become fully operational. This means that the mechanism contains shortcomings and gaps that prevent its broad use by businesses in our countries.
The initial financing conditions for industrial cooperation projects have a significant impact on the practical applicability of this incentive mechanism. For example, there is a requirement that legal entities from at least three EAEU member states participate in a project, or that if a project is terminated early, responsibility for repaying EEC subsidies falls on the financial institution. The lengthy application review process also undermines the mechanism’s attractiveness. During the same period, any individual bank in Belarus opens dozens of credit lines for investment projects.
In practice, only six applications have been approved over the past two years, while another six projects have been under review for more than four months. This is despite the fact that the mechanism is fully funded. The subsidy budget has reached nearly 9 billion Russian rubles, yet we are unable to make use of it. It should also be noted that the projects approved for financing often duplicate production facilities that already exist at the national level.
I believe it would be useful for the Eurasian Economic Commission to once again conduct a comprehensive review of the cooperation support conditions and examine the opinions and proposals of the users of this financial instrument.”, Turchyn said.
According to him, the Eurasian Economic Commission should take these findings into account when developing support instruments for cooperation in the agro-industrial sector.
