The first Deputy Chairman of Sberbank spoke about the implementation of the Moscow-Petersburg high-speed rail project

Of the total amount of debt financing raised for the implementation of the Moscow—St. Petersburg high-speed railway project (almost 1.8 trillion rubles), over 1.3 trillion is accounted for by a syndicate of commercial banks, organized by Sberbank, and 413 billion of them are accounted for by Sberbank. About this "Kommersant-Review" was told by Alexander Vedyakhin, First Deputy Chairman of the Board of Sberbank.

"In 2024, thanks to the joint efforts of all project participants, the tasks set by the President of the Russian Federation were completed: a concession agreement was signed setting out the terms of the project, and on December 20, financial closure was achieved — contracts were signed to attract financing for the project totaling more than 1.7 trillion rubles," Vedyakhin said..

He also noted that it took more than five months to formalize the relations between the project participants into binding agreements since the signing of the concession in July last year, which is a very short period for such a volume of documentation. "In addition, at the end of 2024, amendments were made to the budget legislation that will allow placing 300 billion rubles of funds from the National Welfare Fund allocated for the project on subordinated deposits with banks participating in the syndicate, with the obligation of banks to issue a loan to the borrower on preferential terms similar to the deposit," Vedyakhin added.

However, he continued, there is a need to make additional changes to the concession legislation, since it assumes that the subject of the concession is real estate, and in the HSR project a significant part of the concession object is high—speed rolling stock, that is, movable property acquired on lease. Therefore, a legislative initiative has been sent to the relevant departments, which will make it possible to replicate the practice of structuring PPP projects with an element of leasing. "In particular, it is proposed to clearly define the procedure for transferring movable property and rights under contracts for its supply to the concessionaire, as well as the procedure for compensating the concessionaire's expenses for the acquisition of property in leasing," Vedyakhin explained.