Rustam Minnikhanov at the partnership financing session: Regional level is not enough for attracting foreign partners, we need serious federal support

On 17 May the Rais (Head) of Tatarstan Rustam Minnikhanov took part at a panel session on the topic of partnership financing, the first outcomes of the experiment in four Russia entities and first assessments, held at the XV International Economic Forum “Russia-the Islamic World: KazanForum 2024”, where he was asked to share his opinion about the progress of the experiment in the region and what is necessary to do for the development of partnership financing in Russia.

Rustam Minnikhanov thanked the Administration of the country, the Central Bank, the Russian Ministry of Finance and members of the Russia parliament – all those who are involved in partnership financing issues, and said: “We have been going to this since long time ago and systemically. The experiment includes four pilot regions, the work is going on everywhere and today we can see that there is an interest to partnership financing. We have developed a road map and are currently implementing it and have developed the Integrated Internet Portal on partnership financing.”

Having mentioned 18 organizations included into the Russian register of partnership finances, he said: ”The most important is that there are positive results. About 1 300 deeds have been signed since the beginning of the experiment.

At the same time Rustam Minnikhanov stated that the regional level only is not enough for attracting foreign partners and a serious federal support is needed and proposed to establish the Federal Integrated Expert Center for developing partnership financing products standards.

He also mentioned the lack of specialists in this field and informed that several higher education institutions such as the Russian Islamic Institute and the Bolgar Islamic Academy, have organized training and retraining but only about 100 people passed the training and more than 300 – retraining courses.

Rustam Minnikhanov said that this is too few and proposed to send recommendations from the Russian Ministry of Science and Higher Education to universities to include subjects on Islamic finances into educational programmes.