Putin appoints veteran reformer Chubais an international envoy
MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian President Vladimir Putin has appointed veteran reformer Anatoly Chubais as his special representative for ties with international organisations, the Kremlin said on Friday.
The announcement comes just days after Chubais, a 65-year-old architect of Russian post-communist reforms in the 1990s and a former leader of a liberal opposition party, resigned as the head of state technology firm RUSNANO which he had run since 2008.
Chubais will represent Putin in "achieving goals of sustainable development", the presidential decree on his appointment said.
The agenda on sustainable development is a United Nations plan to fight poverty and inequality, adopted by its member states in 2015.
Chubais, who said in October that he had been infected with the coronavirus, posted on Facebook that he often had to deal with "something important for the country but not very pleasant for myself".
"This time the future assignment is significant for the country and really interesting for me personally," he wrote.
Chubais will not be a part of Kremlin staff in his new role, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov was quoted by state news agency TASS as saying.
(Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova; Editing by Kirsten Donovan)
