Siberian workers on hunger strike over unpaid wages

MOSCOW – Workers at a paper mill in Siberia owned by businessman Oleg Deripaska protested over unpaid wages yesterday, local media reported, less than a week after prime minister Vladimir Putin rebuked him in a similar dispute.

Reports said 63 people had started hunger strikes and two dozen others were demonstrating against the management of the Soviet-era paper mill on the banks of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake.

The demonstrators were considering blocking a motorway if their demands were not met – a tactic used by the protesters last week before Mr Putin intervened.

Last week on national television, the prime minister humiliated Mr Deripaska, once Russia’s richest man, by treating him as an errant schoolboy and likened him and other factory owners to “cockroaches”. He then forced him to sign a contract restarting supplies to idle factories in the town of Pikalyovo, 270km (170 miles) from St Petersburg.

Mr Deripaska’s investment vehicle Basic Element owns 51 per cent of the Soviet-era paper mill by Lake Baikal which was mothballed during the last quarter of 2008.

Oksana Gorlova, spokeswoman for Basic Element’s timber arm, Continental Management, which manages Baikal paper and pulp mill, said the company had transferred 87.6 million roubles (€2 million) yesterday to pay all wage arrears accumulated since February, when the factory had been due to reopen. She blamed the plant’s closure on a court decision last year, supported by ecologists, which banned the mill from disposing of waste water into the lake.

“No one was thinking about people when the decision was taken that forced us to mothball the plant,” she said.

The mill employs 2,000 people and is the main employer in Baikalsk, which has a total population of 17,000.

Ecologists have said that although they wanted the plant to stop pumping waste into the lake, they also advocated turning the factory into a more environmentally friendly business.