Russia, North Korea need direct contacts between their enterprises and companies - Russian minister

PYONGYANG, April 27. /TASS/. The key goal of the newly established Russia-North Korea Business Council is to promote direct contacts between the two countries’ industrial enterprises and companies, Russian Minister for the Development of the Far East Alexander Galushka told TASS on Monday before leaving from Pyongyang for Russia’s Vladivostok. The minister said that the establishment of this organization stemmed from the need in "direct contacts between industrial enterprises and companies of the two countries." In his words, relations between Russia and North Korea are close to a point when "the train of the Russian-North Korean trade-and-economic relations begins to run exactly on the time-table." All necessary prerequisites are in place, he noted. Trade in roubles between Russia and North Korea had increased dramatically by this April to reach 3.5 billion, he said. The sides reached an agreement on a new model of economic cooperation based of the formula "Russian investments and supplies in exchange for access to North Korea’s mineral resources." Apart from that, the Russian minister noted, Pyongyang "demonstrated understanding to Russia’s proposal to introduce an institution of project managers who will maintain contacts with representatives of North Korea’s administrative system." "It will help reduce investment risks in North Korea and make it easier for Russian companies to run businesses in that country," he said. The Russian minister said that the implementation of the Russian-Korean railway link project Hasan/Russia’s Primorsky Territory/-Rajin /North Korea/ "has switched over from the investment to the operational phase." He said that some 360,000 tonnes of Russian coal had been shipped via this railway section since the beginning of the current year. "We can be certain that this project’s amount will exceed 1.5 million tonnes by the end of the year," Galushka said, adding that this project enjoyed special attention in the protocol signed earlier on Monday after a plenary session of the Russian-North Korean intergovernmental commission on trade-and-economic and science-and-technology cooperation. Read more