Russia's biggest shipyard on the Pacific coast, the Amur Shipbuilding Plant, has been renationalized for a symbolic sum and will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in state aid, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Monday.

The Komsomolsk-on-Amur-based plant, which builds nuclear submarines but found itself on the verge of bankruptcy, will be transferred to the United Shipbuilding Corporation, or USC, the government-controlled holding in which the state is consolidating the country's shipbuilding industry, Putin said.

The plant, which employs 15,000 people, has accumulated a debt of 36 billion rubles ($1.1 billion), including 13.6 billion rubles ($420 million) to state-owned Sberbank, Putin said during a visit to the plant, according to a transcript of his meeting with the plant's workers posted on the government's web site.

"The day before yesterday, Sberbank and a group of private shareholders signed an agreement to sell a 59 percent stake to Sberbank," Putin said, adding that Sberbank would sell the stake to USC, which is 100 percent owned by the state.

After the deal, the state will control 77 percent of the Amur plant.

Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov told reporters in Komsomolsk-on-Amur that Sberbank paid the private shareholders several thousand rubles -- "10 times less than the cost of an air ticket" from Moscow to Amur.

"The company was bankrupt. ... No one was twisting anybody's arm," he said.

The plant doesn't disclose its ownership structure on its official web site. According to a Kommersant report in 2007, the private shareholders include the companies Stigma-Trust (17 percent), Torgovo-Finansovaya Gruppa (15 percent) and Polar Alliance (9.8 percent). There are also private persons among the shareholders, Kommersant said, without naming any of them.

Putin said Monday that the government would give the plant 2.5 billion rubles ($77 million) to restructure its debts and another $400 million over the next 10 years to revitalize production.

The plant has built 97 submarines, including 56 nuclear ones. On Monday, Putin viewed the partially built Project 971 Bars nuclear submarine, on which construction stopped in 1996 because of a lack of financing.

Putin said the plant could not fulfill orders, including by the Defense Ministry, because money sent to its accounts were being sent straight to creditors, including Sberbank. This practice will stop, and the Defense Ministry will send 201 million rubles ($6 million) to the plant "within a week" and another 380 million rubles ($11.7 million) before the end of May, Putin said.

Some of the plant workers quoted in the web site transcript called on Putin to move to return the shipyard to state control.

Ivanov expressed bewilderment over how a company executing sensitive defense orders, including for nuclear submarines, had ended up in private hands in the 1990s.

The shipyard grabbed the headlines last November when an accident with a fire-extinguishing system during open-sea testing of its Nerpa nuclear submarine killed 20 people, including 17 plant employees. Nerpa was being built for the Indian navy.

On Monday, the plant's general director, Nikolai Povzyk, said the submarine was fully repaired and would be passed to the Indians by year's end, Itar-Tass reported.

Putin, who also held a government meeting in Komsomolsk-on-Amur dedicated to reviving Russia's shipbuilding industry, demanded that the country's shipping companies turn to domestic shipbuilders first for new vessels. "It is unacceptable to place orders at foreign shipyards if similar ships can be built in Russia," he said.

At a similar meeting in March, Putin said only 6 percent of ships acquired by Russian companies are Russian-built.

Putin also visited a Komsomolsk-on-Amur aviation plant owned by government-controlled United Aircraft Corporation. The plant is developing a fifth-generation fighter jet, and test flights are expected to start this year. The plant, known by its abbreviation KNAAPO, is also helping build the SuperJet airliner.