Moscow, Russia – March 27, 2012 – Rostelecom OJSC (MICEX - RTS: RTKM, RTKMP; OTCQX: ROSYY) (“the Company”), Russia’s national telecommunications operator, today announces that the Russian Federal Government has appointed Rostelecom as the sole contractor responsible for the implementation and development of infrastructure required to run E-Government systems across Russia between 2012 and 2014. The implementation of E-Government in Russia is part of the “Information Society (2011-2020)” Federal Programme.

The Government has identified 12 key objectives for the programme, which include the creation of E-Government federal components, such as a portal for state services, an inter-agency electronic communications system, a personal office, an identification system, and the development of federal and regional infrastructure services, such as state mail, mobile services, and a system to accept payments for services among many things. The Company will also develop a unified space of trust for digital signatures as well as a unified directory system and qualifiers for state and municipal information systems. 

As well as being responsible for creating an electronic registry office, Rostelecom will also implement the E-Region project, and develop a search engine, enabling end-users’ to find various types of content. The Company is also creating a national platform for distributed data processing, where computing resources are available to users on-line.

Alexey Nashchekin, Vice President for Innovative Development at Rostelecom: “We are proud that Rostelecom’s capabilities are valued by the Russian Government and that we have been re-appointed to work on these large-scale projects. Work conducted by Rostelecom on these projects have also gained international recognition by the United Nations’ E-Government ranking system, which has seen Russia’s E-Government project moving up 32 positions. We continue to actively develop the system, as the number of electronic public services is growing as is the number of regions that now have access to them. The use of Rostelecom’s unique infrastructure is helping to establish the E-Government at a regional and municipal level and this has led to billion of rubles in budget savings.”

Rostelecom acts as a strategic partner for the State and has invested RUB 5 billion of its own funds into the development of the E-government project since 2009.

Rostelecom has achieved significant results while working on this project over several years. Thus, the Company has developed a distributed system for the E-government infrastructure. From October 1, 2011, Rostelecom has digitalised many government services, using an inter-agency electronic communications system. The total number of requests processed by the E-government has already exceeded 154 million since the system’s launch.

Rostelecom has implemented the regional segment infrastructure across 83 Russian regions, and has integrated it at a federal level. 60 regions already have access to the united E-government system and the remaining regions will have it by mid-2012.

The unified government services portal, (www.gosuslugi.ru) has become an efficient tool to provide  public access to information about state bodies’ activities and services. As a result, it has been made much easier to find and pay for a wide range of state services. Currently, around 37,000 services can be reached through the portal and over 1,100 of them have an electronic format. Since the launch of the portal, the total number of viewed pages has exceeded 190 million and around 2 million people have already registered their personal offices on the portal.

Rostelecom uses its retail network to increase accessibility to state services across the country. At present, the Company has installed over 500 infomats in 35 Russian regions and 60 centres that issue digital signatures and 80 centres that issue activation codes have also been opened.