MOSCOW, April 16. /ITAR-TASS/. The Russian government is discussing plans to amnesty capital that may return to the country from offshore zones. The measure might apply not only to foreign cash, but to securities as well.
Two techniques are proposed to encourage repatriation of foreign currency assets. Partial amnesty is one. The taxpayer who agrees to bring the money back into the country will be exempt from penalties and fines for tax evasion, as well as from criminal punishment. Full amnesty is the other. However, it shall not apply to incomes of criminal origin, which are not to be legalized under any circumstance, sources in the Russian government say.
The proposed measure is seen as a complement to the Finance Ministry’s plan for what has been termed “de-offshorization” of the Russian economy, drafted after President Vladimir Putin issued relevant instructions late last year. In his address to the Federal Assembly in December 2013 Putin said that over just one year a total of $111 billion worth of goods (one-fifth of the country’s export) had been through off-shore zones.
The Federation Council (upper house of parliament) estimates that the exodus of funds from Russia to offshore zones over the past twenty years has totaled at least $800 billion. Pro-active measures against capital flight to offshore tax havens were launched in the wake of the Cyprus crisis of 2013, when foreign lenders demanded the authorities should tax bank deposits. Then it turned out that most of the residents of Cyprus-based financial organizations are of Russian descent.