Tashkent, Uzbekistan (UzDaily.com) -- The Ministry of Investment and Foreign Trade (MIFT) paid over 2 billion soums for the accommodation of 84 employees at the InterHotel in Tashkent and the use of a conference room, local media reported.

MIFT, in accordance with the agreement concluded with the hotel, paid 918.6 million soums for the accommodation of 84 employees, including three meals a day, and the use of the conference room for 22 days.

Also, the ministry made payments in the amount of 1.29 billion soums for accommodation and meals for 84 employees for 30 days.

Aziz Voitov, First Deputy Minister of Investment and Foreign Trade, noted:

Commenting on the information circulated by the media today, I would like to draw your attention to some of the details missing in the publication.

The decision to accommodate employees at the hotel was made in the context of time pressure associated with the introduction of the first lockdown. In the event of an unfavorable development of the epidemiological situation, the ministry was faced with the task of guaranteeing a minimum sufficient number of personnel for effective work to support exporting enterprises and entrepreneurs implementing investment projects in difficult conditions of quarantine restrictions. A scenario was chosen in which the middle management, together with one or two key specialists from each department, were isolated in a hotel for remote work. In total, 84 employees of the central office of the ministry were selected. For the most part, employees were transferred to remote work from home, and the MIFT management continued to work as usual, observing all safety requirements.

The logic of determining the hotel for accommodation is clear and transparent: InterHotel is our subordinate hotel, which is managed by the State Unitary Enterprise InterForum. From the point of view of controlling the situation and saving money, this is obviously the best option, in fact, the money moved within the MIFT system. Moreover, not a single sum of budget funds was used to pay for these expenses.

In addition, we did not go beyond the amounts recommended to hotels for accommodating people in quarantine, although InterHotel belongs to the hotels of a higher price category. This is another plus of the choice of a subordinate organization, but for the hotel itself, our initiative did not become a "forced" load: rather, on the contrary - in the conditions of a lockdown, we managed to ensure at least partial employment of hotel employees.

The main thing I would like to emphasize is that this strategy has proven its effectiveness - none of the 84 employees were infected with the coronavirus. This made it possible to maintain the uninterrupted operation of the ministry, and as a result - the implementation of projects, the economic effect of which is estimated not at hundreds of millions, but at trillions of soums.

However, in the future, as a department open to external inquiries, we would like a more constructive approach from the media. We believe that publications of this kind would be less biased when receiving preliminary rather than subsequent clarifications from the ministry. We hope that in the end we will come to this very format of interaction with the mass media.