The annual UIC Finance Committee took place on 7 June. It brought together the Finance Directors of the UIC European active members and gave an opportunity for the eight working groups to report on their work.

The meeting was chaired by David Sitruk, SNCF, President of the Finance Committee and Thierry Béra, UIC Finance Director. Presentations included reports made by the groups: PATRIC (audit passenger group) during which the speaker underlined an urgent need to recruit more auditors for the work of the group; RCF 1 (Accounting and Financial Regulations – Passenger Working Party) spoke about an updated version of the leaflet 301; RCF 2 (Accounting and Financial Regulations – Freight Working Party), mentioned that the leaflet 304 was ready to be translated into three languages and published; RCF 3 (Financial relations between railways undertakings - Principles and terms of application) reported on the work of corrections of the leaflet 311; ODC (Office of Debt Clearance) explained that further to the work of the group the general level of debt was going down; the Statistics group focused on finance and railway statistics; the Taxation group focused on strengthening the positions in exchanges with the tax authorities and the Legal Group, which works on the request of members, with the current request coming from MERITS Project on the opening of MERITS to third parties.

Special presentations were given by David Sitruk on a new project of the SNCF renovation and Thierry Béra on the work of the Africa Region. He went through numerous successful events organised in Algiers, Rabat, Djibouti and other locations in 2018.

The meeting allowed participants to exchange views on the evolution of Railway Finance activities, GDPR – General data Protection Regulation and its implementation and enlarge their knowledge of the UIC projects and perspectives.