Presidential plenipotentiary envoy to the Russian Far East Viktor Ishayev urged the stepping-up of construction work for the 2012 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in the Russian city of Vladivostok.
He said that 17 of the 48 construction sites being built for the forum are still only in their design and pre-design stages. The cost of the remaining construction work amounts to over 10 billion rubles ($322 million).
"At the beginning of the year, 12.6 percent of the funds allocated for construction were used," Ishayev said, adding that the share will rise to a maximum of 25 percent by July 1.
He said that even if 40 percent of funds are used by the end of the year, there will still be a colossal amount of work to do before the summit. One of the reasons for the delay, he noted, was that some issues still had to be agreed on with the federal agencies and the defense and finance ministries.
Total financial support allotted to preparations for the summit amounts to 553 billion rubles ($18 billion).
To prepare for the APEC-2012 Forum, the special federal program Development of the Far East and the Trans-Baikal Region was supplemented with a subprogram called Development of Vladivostok as a Center of International Cooperation in the APR.
The 2011 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit will be held in Honolulu in Hawaii from November 12-13.
VLADIVOSTOK, June 24 (RIA Novosti)
