30 September 2003 00:53
Moscow to put squeeze on oil company taxes ENERGY LOBBY:
The Russian government has said it will impose an additional Dollars 1.5bn
(Euros 1.3bn, Pounds 900m) of taxes a year on its oil companies as it tries
to tighten the squeeze on the country's powerful energy lobby.
German Gref, minister for trade and economic development, said energy
companies would be taxed on a sliding scale based on the quality of their
assets. There would be a shift towards "differentiated taxation"
away from the flat tax on natural resources that left "some companies
with super-profits and some hardly at break-even".
The move would increase government revenues by about 2 per cent this year,
although the tax rise is still smaller than many politicians had wanted.
It is the strongest indication yet that the authorities are responding to
growing political pressure to impose extra "penalties" on the
owners of some of the country's largest companies who benefited from the
cut-price insider privatisations of the key natural resource industries in
the 1990s.
It is also a direct challenge to some of the biggest shareholders of Yukos,
the country's largest oil company, who have been subject to criminal
investigations since July.
Yukos was one of the most active and ultimately successful lobbyists for the
introduction of a flat tax on natural resources, which irritated senior
governmental officials. The company, with some highly attractive oil
reserves, benefited directly from the flat tax proposals.
Politicians from both the left and right have called for ways to recover some
of the substantial profits being reported by the privatised oil groups, at a
time when millions of Russians live below the poverty line.
Boris Nemtsov, leader of the Union of Right Forces, has called for Dollars
2bn or more in additional tax payments from the natural resource groups in
exchange for an amnesty on re-examining privatisations.
Sergei Glaziev, head of the Russia's Regions party and Homeland
electoral bloc, has also called for a natural resource rent.
But Mr Gref's statement suggests the government itself may attempt to
seize the initiative, possibly using it as an electoral tool for the
pro-Kremlin United Russia party in the build-up to December parliamentary
elections.
In his comments, at a conference for foreign investors in Moscow hosted by
Brunswick UBS, the investment bank, he suggested that the quid pro quo was
likely to be a new sub-soil regime that would provide additional security of
ownership of existing oil wells by their current operators.
[FTI [The Financial Times]] |
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