By RIA Novosti
Moscow : The delivery of the Russian Navy's decommissioned aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov sold to India under a 2004 contract may be delayed indefinitely as overhaul of the vessel has been slowed down by insufficient funding and poor management, a Russian daily said Wednesday.
It would take at least another four years to complete overhauling and modernising the ship, the Izvestia reported. The vessel is being upgraded at the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk, in northern Russia.
The contract to deliver the aircraft carrier to India, which state-run arms exporter Rosoboronexport signed with the Indian Navy in January 2004, covers upgrading the ship and equipping it with modern weaponry, including the MiG-29K Fulcrum aircraft and Ka-27 Helix-A and Ka-31 Helix-B anti-submarine helicopters.
"The aircraft carrier is being overhauled at the shipyard, but the funds allocated for the work under the contract are not sufficient and we will have a hard time to meet the schedule," Sevmash shipyard's acting director Eduard Borisov was quoted by the newspaper as saying.
"We are practically building a new ship using an old hull and changing everything else," Borisov said.
A high ranking source in the defence industry told RIA Novosti that the company's officials had underestimated the projected overhaul budget by at least 60-70 percent but did not rectify it for a long time.
He said the work already done on the Admiral Gorshkov could be compared to the construction of two destroyers. "It would have been much easier to start the construction of an aircraft carrier from scratch than to modernize the old one," the source said, adding that funds already spent on rebuilding compared to construction of two destroyers.
Former director of the Sevmash shipyard, Vladimir Pastukhov, has been recently fired over his poor management of the project and some media reports suggested that prosecutors had been investigating a possible fraud case over mismanagement of funds by Sevmash officials.
Izvestia said Nikolai Kalistratov, the general director of the neighbouring Zvyozdochka shipyard, could be appointed as the new head of Sevmash in the next few weeks.
The $1.5-billion Admiral Gorshkov sale is one of Russia's largest individual military deals with India. The two countries are currently working on military contracts worth $10 billion.
After joining the Indian Navy, the 45,000-ton aircraft carrier will be renamed the INS Vikramaditya and could replace the outdated INS Viraat, a Centaur-class aircraft carrier, which India purchased from Britain in 1986.