Translated material
The Ministry of Transport proposed introducing a fee for crossing the border
The Ministry of Transport of the Russian Federation proposed to introduce a fee for crossing the border from cars and freight trains. It is reported by "Kommersant" with reference to sources.
According to the newspaper, it is proposed to charge trains for a ton of cargo, and cars - depending on their category. It follows from the note that both cars and trucks will have to pay for the fare.
The collected funds are supposed to be spent on the arrangement of border points, which since 2016 have been under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Transport. The cost of their modernization, as reported in August, the department estimates at 250 billion rubles
The details of the initiative, including the timing of the introduction of the fee and its size, have not yet been worked out. An “extended meeting on this issue” is scheduled for the second half of October, a newspaper source said. According to another interlocutor, the fee could be introduced as early as the second half of 2017.
According to Kommersant, they are considering both the option of creating a single operator for collecting fees on the model of the Platon system, and the option with several operators. The source of the publication did not rule out that the fee will not be introduced at all, but only at new checkpoints.
Pepeliaev Group tax expert Vadim Zaripov notes that the decision of the Constitutional Court, which recognized payments within the framework of Platon not as a tax or a fee, but as a “mandatory public individual reimbursable payment of a compensatory fiscal nature”, gave the green light to the introduction of new such fees no change in tax laws.
- The Ministry of Transport announced at the end of August that 250 billion rubles are needed for the modernization of checkpoints. According to Deputy Minister Aleksey Tsydenov, “out of 314 operating checkpoints, no more than 20 percent meet the regulatory requirements for technical support and arrangement and sanitary conditions.” The modernization of each requires an average of a billion rubles, he said.