Agenda: reducing the debt burden on the regions, low-interest loans for the importers of high-priority products, new measures to stimulate business activity, an integrated information system to monitor low-interest lending programmes, and extending the term of forest declarations.
Mikhail Mishustn’s opening remarks:
Good afternoon, colleagues. As the President said, our country is confidently dealing with the external challenges. The Government continues working to create the legislative environment for protecting the Russian economy from the effects of the sanctions adopted by unfriendly countries.
One of the main tasks is to support the regions and strengthen their financial stability. They now can restructure their payments under the budgetary loans they have taken out for deficiency payments, both principal and interest payments. A respective Government resolution has been signed.
The rules approved by the Government will allow the regions to defer payments. This deferment may apply to 100 percent of this year’s payments, with only 5 percent payable during the next two years.
Overall, deferred payments can be made in equal instalments within five years starting in 2025. This will allow the regions to seriously reduce their debt burdens, to invest the released funds in dealing with current issues, to offer new support measures to people and businesses, and to launch new projects to strengthen their economies.
This May we launched a programme of low-interest loans for the importers of high-priority products. We have allocated over 37 billion roubles for its implementation. This decision was approved at a Government meeting last week. Overall, subsidised loans have been assessed at over 800 billion roubles this year. We believe that this will be enough to cover the Russian enterprises’ basic requirements for financing the import of the necessary materials, components, raw materials and equipment.
This will help businesses resume the import of products which are not yet produced in Russia so as to maintain smooth operations and to re-enter the growth trajectory.
We are also implementing other important decisions to support the economy amid external sanctions. The Government has added 10 more items to the priority action plan. Our main goal is to saturate the economy with liquidity and to help boost the investment process.
One measure has to do with corporate relations and the financial market, and is designed to further stimulate business activity. We intend to allow the sanctioned companies to delay the election of their boards of directors. This is especially important for public joint stock companies, where boards are a compulsory governance body, but it may be difficult to meet this requirement under current circumstances.
We also plan to allow the boards of directors to retain their powers without re-election in some cases, for example, when the number of directors has fallen below the legal minimum.
It is important to maintain the stability of public companies, which largely depends on the stock markets. They remain highly volatile so far. The quotations of securities are liable to variations regardless of objective economic factors, and the current low quotations do not reflect the real value of Russian assets.
Under these circumstances, we have introduced a temporary procedure for buying the companies’ own shares on the stock exchanges. It will be effective until late August and allow companies to keep their shares for up to one year.
Today we propose extending the timeframe to two years, during which we expect stock market prices to stabilise. This will allow our companies to increase their planning horizon and to use this mechanism more actively.
It is important not only to coordinate new support packages, but also to monitor their implementation. For this purpose, we intend to introduce an integrated information system to monitor low-interest lending programmes. A similar mechanism is being used within the framework of the FOT 3.0 loan support programme. It involves our main lending organisations and has proved to be effective.
The new system will allow participants to receive information about loans under all loan support programmes directly from banks, reduce processing times and ensure temporal synchronisation of statistics online.
At the same time, we will have a reliable feedback mechanism, which will help us to both monitor the effectiveness of loan support and promptly adjust and make extra settings, in order to react more coherently to new changes and challenges.
The timber industry is another sector in need of more lax regulation.
Just like many other Russian entrepreneurs, timber businesses are facing challenges, due foreign suppliers’ refusal to fulfil earlier obligations. Supply chains have also been disrupted following the sanctions. Consequently, companies find it hard to export, store and process timber.
At the same time, forest declarations allowing businesses to cut and export timber regulate its procurement. Violators are prosecuted according to law.
Considering the present-day difficulties, the Government will support the request of businesspersons to extend the duration of the forest declarations from 12 months to 24 months, provided that they have been submitted before 1 May 2022. Consequently, it will be possible to work under the current declarations through 1 May 2024.
The new procedure will give businesspersons enough time to adapt to the new situation and to set up a system of timber deliveries.
Colleagues, the new decisions should be enacted as soon as possible. Businesses need them badly. I am asking you to promptly draft the respective regulatory framework.
Today, we will review a new package of proposals, including those on charging higher advance payments for regional utility infrastructure modernisation projects.
