Finance Ministry seeks reestablishment of resource-export taxes- paper
MOSCOW. May 5 (Interfax) - The Russian Finance Ministry is suggesting hiking the natural resource extraction tax (NRET) and restoring all customs duties on exported natural resources, the Kommersant business daily writes.
"The government, having eliminated a series of tax breaks for the oil industry, could shift its attention to Gazprom ," the paper wrote on Thursday.
Kommersant has an April 4 letter from Deputy Prime Minister Alexei Kudrin, who is also the country's finance minister, to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, in which he suggests that Putin "bring the tax burden on the gas sector closer to the burden on the oil sector."
To do this, the NRET on gas in Russia needs to be higher starting in 2012, the letter says, without saying by how much. What is also needed is "a revisiting of the policy of levying export customs duties on export gas" from Russia "to several foreign countries," Kommersant reports.
The article notes that "having implemented one of these scenarios or both in combination, the government would be able to raise an additional up to 150 billion rubles a year from the gas sector."
Kudrin said his position is based on the fact that gas prices, and with them Gazprom sales revenues, are continually going up - gas prices rose 62% from 2005 to 2009 to $249 per 1,000 cubic meters, and those sales revenues doubled to 3 trillion rubles, the paper says.
The article says that "even so, the proportion of customs and tax payments in Gazprom sales revenues, on the contrary, decreased from 49% to 37%. Not even increasing the NRET in 2011 by 61% to 237 rubles per 1,000 cubic meters helped to increase that proportion in the monopoly's sales revenues (the Finance Ministry got this for several years)."
So, Kudrin says, "If there is to be a balanced federal budget" in 2012-2014, gas and oil sector taxes need to be more like each other.
Neither the Finance Ministry nor Gazprom have provided any official commentary on this report.
Unofficially, Gazprom sources view the ministry initiative with skepticism. "Conversations about the necessity of raising the NRET have been going on as long as we can remember," a Kommersant source at the gas giant said.
A Kommersant source at one of the ministries says that the Economic Development Ministry backs Kudrin's idea, having supported previous NRET initiatives. No comment from that ministry has been forthcoming.