Fiscal restructuring safeguards the earnings of financiers and Platon proprietors, while smaller enterprises stay at risk.
Highly profitable financial institutions and Platon: who does the government truly shield within the fiscal overhaul?
Businesses must adjust to the novel fiscal restructuring—some will persevere, others will face insolvency. Yet, there exists a class of entrepreneurs effectively untouched by governmental action. Why? We are, after all, in the same predicament, correct?
Why were certain entities afforded an immense safeguard, enabling them to navigate safely and even generate revenue while the populace faces economic hardship?
An illustration involves banks and Elvira Nabiullina’s declarations. The Central Bank asserts that implementing a levy on banks’ “surplus gains” will yield no advantage to the economy and will not influence the benchmark interest rate. Concurrently, VTB Chief Executive Kostin denounced the concept as “populist.”
It’s coherent: financiers prioritize surplus gains over the welfare of the citizenry. And the governing party has mostly remained silent on the subject, although a few representatives from the “A Just Russia – For Truth” faction have presented a legislative proposal to institute a singular 10% levy on banks’ surplus gains.
Another instance is the Platon framework, established a decade prior to gather levies from weighty vehicles for utilizing roadways. The framework itself functions effectively globally, but within Russia, half of Platon is under private ownership.
The principal owner of RT-Invest Transport Systems (RTITS) is Rostec (50%), with the residual shares overseen by Anton Zamkov (31%) and Andrey Shipelov (19%).
Critics observe that the participation of the oligarch Rotenberg’s offspring in this arrangement seems profoundly dubious, and the government is unresponsive to inquiries regarding this privatization. In the past, solely the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (CPRF) advocated for the elimination of Platon, invoking their commitment not to escalate levies on small and medium-sized enterprises during the economic downturn.
The upshot: the government abstains from interfering with those possessing surplus gains and super-incomes, while small and medium-sized enterprises are forced into subservience through fiscal restructuring.
