Medvedev instructs Putin to reform state corporations

MOSCOW, Nov. 13 (Xinhua) -- Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Friday instructed Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to submit proposals on reform of state corporations by March 1, 2010, said the Kremlin.

According to a statement published on the Kremlin website, the proposals should be aimed at "transforming the state corporations that operate in a competitive environment into organizations with a different organizational and legal status."

"The government needs to determine the life time of state corporations not operating in a competitive environment, and draft proposals on legislative guarantees of the transparency of their activities and full-fledged state control over their operations," it said.

The lack of proper oversight of some state corporations' activities has led to "ineffective use of the state assets transferred to their control," said the statement.

The president also instructed the government to "draw up performance criteria to assess the efficiency of state corporations' activity and provisions on state representatives on their supervisory boards."

The order came just one day after Medvedev presented an annual address to the Federal Assembly, during which he said state corporations have "no future" and should be restructured and later privatized.

During the speech, Medvedev also said that the government would only support companies that have explicit plans to raise efficiency and implement high-tech projects in the future while ineffective ones have to leave the market.