MOSCOW, December 29. /TASS/. Sale of foreign currency revenue by exporters has given results, Russia’s First Deputy Prime Minister Andrey Belousov said in an interview with Kommersant daily.

"We had active trade and active current balance for so many years that we forgot that the major function of exports is to fund imports. Exports have always been larger than imports. However, with payments shifting to national currencies the situation changed. A significant part of imports, almost 30%, is still in euro and dollars, while [trade is done] in rubles and in currencies of friendly countries," he said, adding that "one of the reasons of the necessity to introduce obligatory sale of foreign currency revenue is to flatten out the situation." "Companies admitted that this is quite a flexible mechanism. It works only for large companies," the official noted.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov told reporters in early December that the government’s measures on obligatory sale of foreign currency revenues by exporters play the role of a stabilizer of volatility of the ruble’s exchange rate.