Penalty flow

A Moscow company has already had to pay 500 thousand rubles for hiring illegal migrants

The capital's migration service is already actively taking advantage of amendments to legislation that have significantly increased the responsibility of Russian companies for hiring illegal migrant workers . Recently, a record fine was paid in Moscow for violating migration laws - 500 thousand rubles. Nikolai Azarov, Deputy Head of the Immigration Control Department of the Federal Migration Service for Moscow, spoke about this yesterday at a press conference, summing up the results of the first month of implementation of the new migration policy. And although the maximum provided by law is 800 thousand rubles. for legal entities using migrant labor without a work permit - has not yet been reached, fines of 150, 200 and 300 thousand rubles. are already used as the main means of influencing unscrupulous businessmen. As Deputy Prime Minister of Moscow Valery Vinogradov noted a day earlier, the total amount of fines for violation of migration laws issued since the beginning of the year has already amounted to 8 million rubles.

Mr. Azarov noted that the emphasis is now on testing markets . “The majority of violations, of course, are in the markets - we check the market sector first,” he said, explaining to the Vremya Novostey correspondent that in addition to punishment with the ruble, other types of administrative penalties were also used. In particular, according to him, “in a month, Moscow district courts suspended the activities of several large companies that employed foreigners without issued permits.”

At the same time, a representative of the capital’s FMS department emphasized that replenishing the budget with “penalty” rubles is not an end in itself for the service. “Our most important achievement is that, compared to last year, we issued much more work permits. Just before February 1, two weeks after the new legislation came into force , we issued 26 thousand work permits. And last year for the whole of January there were only 3.5 thousand,” said Mykola Azarov. An increase in the number of applications for work permits is also observed in other regions of Russia. As director of the Federal Migration Service of Russia Konstantin Romodanovsky said yesterday at a video conference at the Ministry of Internal Affairs dedicated to the situation in market trade, “compared to last year, the number of applications has quadrupled.” The number of just visitors wishing to obtain legal status is also increasing. Thus, according to Nikolai Azarov, to date, since the beginning of the year, the Moscow Federal Migration Service has registered 141,522 foreigners. 56,731 applications for work permits have been submitted, and 43,430 plastic cards have already been officially issued. True, firms promising intermediary services in obtaining permits are not reducing their activity. “We are now, together with law enforcement agencies, fighting against numerous scammers who produce false permits,” Mr. Azarov said yesterday, admitting that such “intermediaries” sometimes even appear in queues near the passport and visa service departments. “And the queues, by the way, have decreased compared to January,” he noted.

Kirill MELNIKOV