Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref promised a room full of the country’s most powerful oil and gas players Thursday that Russia will soon pass the Land and Labor codes, enact new laws protecting shareholders rights, overhaul the judicial system, restructure its rail and gas monopolies and join the World Trade Organization.

He also cleared up the government’s position on production sharing agreements, or PSAs, which are crucial to attracting more foreign investment.

Gref, speaking to the heads of some 30 Russian and foreign oil and gas companies at the Moscow International Petroleum Club, said that the previous government’s work on PSAs was "very inefficient" because the state had no experience in project financing.

"But if Russia want to go into partnership with foreign investors, it is necessary to develop the PSA system," he said.

PSAs are contracts between the government and oil or gas companies that fix taxes, tariffs and other production costs in advance of extraction, part of which the state gets.

Without such binding agreements, oil and gas firms will not shell out the billions of dollars needed to develop major new fields. Russia currently has only four PSAs in place: Sakhalin 1, Sakhalin 2, Kharyaga and Samotlor. A handful of other PSAs have been approved by the government and are being negotiated.

Gref, who heads the government’s PSA program, stressed the government’s commitment to hammering out PSA investment policy as quickly as possible. Gref proposed establishing a new organization to take charge of PSAs. He said the government was debating whether the new body will be a federal organ or a national oil company — a model used by several countries around the world. Either way, Gref said, the body should belong to an "economic department of the government."

Gref also defined a healthy investment climate as consisting of macro economic stability, political stability, property protection and attractive interest rates.

"In many ways," he said, "Russia has already reached macroeconomic and political stability. The next steps should be realizing the rest of the conditions needed to attract investments."