Prime Minister Vladimir Putin accused federal bodies in Moscow on Friday of not properly distributing money in the North Caucasus, highlighting the Kremlin's struggle to contain an Islamist insurgency there.
"I consider it unacceptable when federal agencies, acting on various pretexts, refer to the inherent difficulties they face when transferring funds," Putin told senior government officials, including North Caucasus envoy Alexander Khloponin.
He said Russia’s state bank, the Ministry of Education and the Energy Ministry were the main culprits in not getting much-needed state funds to the mainly Muslim region, where unemployment is as high as 50 percent in some regions.
A decade after Moscow drove separatists out of power in the second of two wars in Chechnya, the North Caucasus is plagued by near daily violence, where poverty-stricken youths want to carve out a separate, Islamic state.
Despite pouring money into the North Caucasus, Kremlin critics regularly accuse Moscow of endemic corruption and red tape, meaning the funds get lost and pocketed along the way.
"The hardest thing is to make sure the investors fulfil their obligations," Khloponin told reporters on Friday.
Appointed by President Dmitry Medvedev a year ago, the Siberian former business executive has been accused by the Kremlin of doing too little in taming the region it has labelled Russia’s biggest domestic political problem.
Putin unveiled plans for 37 major new projects in the energy, construction and tourism sectors this year across the patchwork of republics along the country’s southern fringe, investments totalling 400 billion roubles ($13.36 billion).
The investments, aimed at employing 400,000 people over the next decade, are part of a long-term plan to develop the North Caucasus through to 2025 that the Kremlin proposed last July.
