Translated material
Presidential redistribution
Regions ordered to share land revenues
The sale of land lease rights, as well as state-owned land plots themselves, will begin from this year to bring income not only to local budgets, but also to the federal one. This will happen thanks to the presidential decree “On the distribution of funds received from the sale of state-owned land plots or the right to lease them to citizens and legal entities” (No. 262 of 03/05/2001). Until now, all income from such transactions was received by sellers and lessors - regional and local authorities. Now, as the decree states, funds will be distributed “between budgets of all levels.”The draft decree was prepared by the Ministry of Property. The deputy head of this department, Elena Bondarenko, clarified in an interview with a correspondent of the Vremya Novostei newspaper that income from land transactions will now be shared in the same way as it is today with current payments for land use (land tax and rent). This ratio is established annually by the budget law. This year, 30% is allocated to the federal budget, 20% to the regional budget and 50% to the local budget.
The Ministry of Property could not name the amount of expected income that entities are required to share with the federal budget this year, since until now such a revenue item simply did not exist in the federal budget. This can be judged only by the income of the consolidated Russian budget from the sale of land plots and lease rights received last year.
As an anonymous representative of Roszemkadastr told the Vremya Novostey newspaper, this amount amounted to about 700 million rubles, and about a third was owed to the federal center in 2001. Compared to income from current payments (last year land tax and rent amounted to 24.8 billion rubles), the amount is small.
And you can hardly count on more.
According to a representative of Roszemkadastr, “since 1992, when commercial transactions with land were allowed, interest in these transactions in Russia as a whole has been declining.” The reason is the lack of effective demand. “Whoever needs it has already bought it for themselves a long time ago,” said the Federal Land Office. At the same time, according to their data, the main turnover in the land market is in the gardening or dacha sector. An increase in income from land transactions can only be counted on after the creation of a regulatory framework. There are plenty of gaps in Russian land legislation. There is no Land Code yet, the draft of which the government will consider in mid-April. The issue of ownership of “federal” land has also not been resolved (according to the resolution of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation, adopted back in 1991, all land in Russia belongs to the state), which is administered by regional and local authorities (according to the law “On the Fundamentals of Local Self-Government”).
Therefore, the approved procedure for the distribution of income from land transactions will apply, as the text of the presidential decree states, “until the delimitation of state ownership of land.”
The bill “On the delimitation of state ownership of land” was recently rejected by the Federation Council. The senators are not satisfied with the fact that according to this bill, the delimitation of land plots is supposed to be carried out by government regulations, without taking into account the opinions of regional authorities. It is possible that the presidential order is intended to help senators "find a compromise."