MOSCOW. May 17 (Interfax-AVN) - Russia does not fully meet its obligations on financing the development of the AN-70 military transport plane, a competent source in the aircraft building industry told Interfax-Military News Agency on Friday.
The Russian budget debt to the plane's designers amounts to USD48.2m, the source said.
"At the latest session of the Russian-Ukrainian commission on military-technical cooperation in December 2001, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Kasyanov promised to extinguish the debt in 2002 but the problem still remains unsolved," the source said.
He stressed that all work on the plane production program was coordinated by the Medium Transport Plane international consortium uniting Russian, Ukrainian and Uzbek enterprises. In accordance with earlier accords, the enterprises invest their own funds in the program and will later get compensations from the Russian and Ukrainian state budgets. Russia's debt totaled almost USD60m about 1.5-2 years ago.