TALLINN - A temporary Russian bureaucratic decision involving ownership of freight cars sent a jolt through Estonia's cargo industry and even resulted in a substantial loss for one company last week.
In February Rossiyskiye Zheleznye Dorogi (Russian Railways) stopped providing loading services for foreign-owned cars not running on routes between Russia and their country of registration. The company ordered all freight car owners to return their freight cars to the country of origin as soon as they're unloaded in Russia.
The situation threatened to paralyze Estonian transit, since, according to one report, there are 13,000 cars owned by Estonian companies and leased to Russia, several times more than the country's railway stations could handle.
As it was, nearly all Russia-based tank cars of Estonian companies, a large part of which are on lease to Russian firms, were standing idle.
Thankfully, Russia's Ministry of Transport stepped in and ruled that Russian Railway's decision was unlawful.
"As things stand, everything will remain as it was," Juri Mois, an owner of Meta-Eks SP, a rail car leasing company, told the Baltic News Service.
He opined that Russian Railways' decision was prompted by a desire to banish foreign competition. "In Russia the railway was separated from the ministry only a couple of years ago. Now the state-owned rail company has discovered that, according to statistics, it has approximately 15,000 tank cars standing idle, while Russian companies are leasing large numbers of tank cars from neighboring countries," Mois explained.
"So, to raise efficiency, RZD has once or twice staged actions to drive foreign cars out of Russia," he added.
Mois explained that the Agreement on International Goods Transport by Rail concluded between former Soviet republics and several other countries allows cars of countries party to the agreement to travel freely on one another's railways. "This fact becomes clear yet again by the end of each [Russian Railways] campaign," he said. "The situation was more or less the same in spring 2004. This has to be taken as a peculiarity of the Russian business environment, no more."
The head of the rail operator Spacecom of the Russian Severstaltrans group, Oleg Osinovsky, told the Russian paper Delovye Vedomosit that besides foreign rail operators almost all Russian companies competing with Russian Railways are facing big problems.
"The problem is that [Russian Railways] is not only demanding a customs duty on rail cars but also wants to force them to operate on fixed routes," Osinovsky explained. "This means that trains of [Russian Railways] can run where they want but the rest, only where they're allowed to."
