Rosgranitsa regional office chief Michael Smolkin: "Safety requirements should not be sacrificed in favor of operations speed"

Unnecessary delays of ships in Russian ports substantially reduce their competitiveness, and the current border crossing procedures inherited from Soviet era do not correspond any more to the modern realities.

In a recent interview with PortNews the head of the NW regional department of Rosgranitsa (Russian border services agency) Michael Smolkin told about the agency’s achievements and problems in creation of modern border checkpoints and new schemes in Russia’s North-West region.

- Mr. Smolkin, has the Big Port St. Petersburg’s checkpoint boundaries been established. When is it going to be officially opened?

- Because of the nature of the Big Port St. Petersburg, the checkpoint will be commissioned step-by-step, when business entities operating there will be ready for this. We suppose that there will be about 15 posts, each of them encompassing several business entities. The posts will join 35 stevedore companies at the port. The schedule of their arrangement is constantly adjusted according to the preparedness of each entity.

 Before the opening of the checkpoint posts it is necessary that the interdepartmental committee defines their limits. Currently, we have established some of them but without mapping this data we can not specify situation on each site.
The Big Port is a very complex object, divided by the property relations that were developing for quite a long period. There are as well private lands, as the plots acquired in the long-term lease, the federal property... At the same time, the land with checkpoint posts after their limits are established should be transferred to Rosgranitsa for free, so the property relations must be clearly defined and worked out.

In future, Rosgranitsa and the Ministry of Transport will be investing in the sites development (through the federal programs), backed by public-private partnership.

We will be able to transfer the checkpoint posts to the state regulatory authorities and establish the regime rules only after the job is completed (boundaries, mapping, etc.). The control authorities should clearly understand where exactly and how they should perform their functions. It is a very important and difficult moment.

Vitaly Chernov