State Duma Retains Amount of Funds to be Spent on State Debt Servicing

The State Duma rejected an amendment to the 2003 budget draft. This document envisaged a decrease in the sum for servicing state and municipal debts by 4.1bn rubles ($129.5m). These resources were planned to be spent on law enforcement activity (200m rubles), industry (500m rubles), fundamental research (500m rubles), education (2bn rubles), culture (200m rubles), mass media (200m rubles) and health care (500m rubles). Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Alexey Kudrin declared that the budget draft envisaged the euro rate at 0.93 USD/EUR, while the current rate was 0.98 USD/EUR. So the amount of funds that are to be spent on servicing of state debts has remained totaling 277,510,056,000 rubles (about $8.75bn).