Concept of windfall tax 'agreed in detail', bill will go to Duma soon - Siluanov

MOSCOW. March 3 (Interfax) - The Russian authorities and businesses have agreed on the concept of the windfall tax, a one-time tax payment from additional profits earned in 2021-2022 on the back of high prices, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said.

The relevant bill should be submitted to the State Duma soon.

"What is the point of our proposal? It is the following, that in recent years - 2022 and 2021 - we've seen a fairly high level of revenues from the current market situation in whole areas of business, and we proposed to our business partners to transfer a portion of the situational windfall revenue to the budget in the form of a tax. And we proposed to take not one year, the previous one, but take the growth of businesses' incomes for the period of 2022-2021 and compare it to the period of 2019-2018, bypassing Covid-hit 2020," Siluanov said in an interview on TV channel RT.

The Finance Ministry proposed to "centralize in the budget for state needs" part of the difference between the amount of income in these two periods, he said.

This is the arrangement that was described earlier this week by Interfax sources familiar with the talks on the windfall tax. The size of the contribution could amount to about 4-5% of the additional profit in the two-year period, they said.

"We are grateful to businesses, our proposals were heard. We discussed these proposals with entrepreneurs, agreed in detail and soon we will already be ready to come out with a legislative initiative to parliament so that this idea can be realized this year," Siluanov said in the interview.

He confirmed the previously stated estimate for budget revenues from the windfall tax, about 300 billion rubles.

Compared to the budget's overall revenue base of 26 trillion rubles, this is not a very significant amount, but the "money fairly substantial for financing those programs, those social programs that we are conducting and will conduct this year, which, basically, will support both people and our infrastructure plans," Siluanov said.