Who benefits from excess income?

Arkady Dvorkovich and Alexey Kudrin disagreed on additional taxation of Gazprom

Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin, despite the government’s refusal to even think about withdrawing Gazprom’s windfall profits from high world gas prices, does not seem to have abandoned this fiscal idea. On the sidelines of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, he told reporters yesterday that he would make proposals to increase taxation of the gas industry on his own initiative. Mr. Kudrin was opposed in St. Petersburg by the head of the Kremlin's expert department, Arkady Dvorkovich, who believes that the government should have a unified position on where to spend these windfall profits - in the interests of the entire country or on Gazprom's investment plans.

As you know, at the last government meeting last week, Mr. Kudrin tried to start a discussion in the White House about the super-income of the gas monopolist, which goes past the budget and is spent on dubious purposes. The Minister of Finance estimated that in 2006 the concern will receive about 400 billion rubles. unplanned revenue. And he asked that an instruction be included in the minutes of the government meeting to study the issue of additional taxation of Gazprom’s excess profits. “I’m not talking about what decision should be made, I propose to give instructions and study this issue,” the Minister of Finance noted then.

However, there was not even a mention of this issue in the protocol. “Therefore, we will do it ourselves,” Mr. Kudrin said yesterday. “We’ll conduct an analysis and make suggestions.” However, he refused to comment on when this would happen.

As an official representative of Gazprom told Vremya Novostei, the concern needs excess profits for large-scale investments and “the company will be able to manage them more efficiently than it does within the budget process.”

This idea was also voiced by Mr. Dvorkovich yesterday. “I am against (the proposal to seize windfall profits in the gas industry. - Ed. ),” he told reporters. “We understand Gazprom’s long-term program, their plans and the funds that the concern really needs to implement it.” According to him, the relevant decisions on investments in a particular area are made by the board of directors of the concern, in which the majority are representatives of the state. “There should be no contradictions between what one side in the government has determined and what the other has determined,” the Kremlin expert believes.

At the same time, according to Mr. Dvorkovich, the discussion itself about the withdrawal of excess profits can be very productive and will force Gazprom to pursue a more conscious and reasonable investment policy. “The very posing of the question is useful because it forces Gazprom to think about how much is needed and to make plans more clearly,” he said. And this is important, since the government has almost completely lost control over the formation of the monopolist’s budget. And now, unlike previous years, the management of the concern no longer considers it necessary to coordinate its financial plan in the White House, limiting itself to meetings of the board of directors, which are often held in absentia.

Alexey GRIVACHS