Russia, Japan Mull Joint Venture Fund

Russia and Japan are considering starting a joint venture fund, with the final decision to be announced in December, Kirill Dmitriev, the CEO of the Russian Direct Investment Fund (RDIF), said Saturday.

LIMA (Sputnik) — "We have recently announced the creation of a joint venture fund with China, and we will plan the creation of a similar joint venture fund with Japan. The decision has already been taken. We will say in December during the Russian president's visit to Japan who we are creating [the fund] with," Dmitriev said.

The RDIF CEO also said that Japan Bank for International Cooperation and RDIF were finalizing first agreements developed as part of the Russian-Japanese Investment Platform and would announce first projects by the end of 2016.

Dmitriev added that RDIF had a lot of joint projects with partners from Asia Pacific.

"We will move on to forging  partnerships uniting funds from a few different countries and we will continue working with the leading investors from the countries like China, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam and we hope to strengthen our relationship with the United States and other countries," Dmitriev said.

Dmitriev spoke on the sidelines of APEC's economic leaders' summit in the Peruvian capital of Lima. The APEC leaders, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, are expected to work out a strategic vision and guidelines for economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region for 2017.