The Finance Ministry has decided to grant a 2-year amnesty for offshore companies that have Russian owners if they move their assets to Russia. The draft law drawn up at the Finance Ministry forms part of a large-scale deoffshorization program. Under the draft law developed by the Finance Ministry jointly with the Economic Development Ministry, penalties and fines for tax evasion will apply to Russian owners' offshore companies only starting from 2017.
In effect, the term used in Russia, controlled foreign companies, is a translation of the above notion, he adds. However, as a senior associate of Pepeliaev Group law firm, Pyotr Popov, points out, even in the U.S. and the UK these rules failed to resolve the problem of profits being channeled offshore. A case in point, says Pyotr Popov, was a rather tough deoffshorization bill in the U.S. developed with Barack Obama's participation. Under it, an American taxpayer was considered a controlling person of any offshore company with which he had any relations, for example, received loans from. However, the bill wasn't enacted.
