RUSSIA READY TO HELP DEVELOP INDONESIA'S DEFENCE INDUSTRY.

JAKARTA, July 3 Asia Pulse - Russia is ready to provide a loan to Indonesia in return for defense contracts, a senior Russian arms sales official said Friday.

"There is a basic agreement on a loan, though the conditions have yet to be negotiated," Alexander Denisov, co-chairman of the Indonesia-Russia Joint Commission on Military Technical Cooperation and first deputy director of the Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation, told RIA Novosti in an exclusive interview before leaving for Moscow.

"This is going to take some time, since Indonesia needs to define its own priorities. The loan cannot be given without the lender knowing what it will be spent on."

"The program implementation will take years," the Russian official said. "We also agreed to talk about other sources of financing: commercial credits or shipments of Indonesian traditional export products to Russia."

The news came in the wake of the signing of a 2006-2010 bilateral arms trade cooperation program in Jakarta on Thursday. Apart from this, the commission also agreed on the texts of intergovernmental memorandums of understanding on the implementation of the program and the protection of intellectual property rights.

Both will be signed, Denisov said, upon each nation's completion of the necessary internal procedures.

The chief Russian ...