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LenBell Wires Yakutsk

MOSCOW-- The Belgian telecommunications company Alcatel Bell has won a $12.5 million contract to build a telephone exchange in the eastern Siberian republic of Yakutia-Sakha, company and city officials said. LenBell Telephone, a Russian-Belgian joint-stock company controlled by Alcatel Bell, won a tender last week to install a 57,000-line digital exchange in the city of Yakutsk, 4,600 kilometers east of Moscow, according to Alcatel Bell spokesperson Tina Butkhuzi. The project will be funded with a five-year interest-free $20 million loan from the Russian government, a Yakutian official said in a telephone interview

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