Kommersant
Russia, NATO to close helicopter deal for Afghanistan
Russia and NATO are finalizing a contract for the delivery of 21 new Mi-17 Hip military helicopters to Afghanistan.
Moscow has approved the contract at top levels and is ready to deliver several helicopters to Kabul free of charge as a goodwill gesture. NATO, which is trying to find allocations for the helicopter purchase, should now reciprocate.
If implemented, the helicopter contract will be an unprecedented project involving Russia-NATO assistance for a third country, said Russia's Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin.
Several diplomatic sources in Moscow said Russia and NATO had come close to signing the long-discussed contract for the delivery of Mi-17 military helicopters to Afghanistan.
Both sides have been working to overcome disagreements since early 2010. NATO insisted that Russian helicopters be transferred to hard-pressed Kabul free of charge, while Moscow wanted a purely commercial approach.
In late March, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov discussed the helicopter deal with NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen over the phone. At that time, the contract specified 32 helicopters.
The deal's parameters have changed somewhat since then. A source in the Russian Foreign Ministry said there were now plans to deliver 21 helicopters. It has also been decided that several helicopters may be transferred to the Afghan Air Force free of charge.
The helicopter contract also envisions the delivery of fuel, weapons systems, components and pilot-training programs. Russia wants to do all this on a commercial basis. Moscow and Brussels are actively negotiating the delivery of helicopters to Afghanistan, a NATO spokesperson said.
The issue will be discussed at an upcoming bilateral meeting, most likely on July 16 at the Russia-NATO Council meeting.
Although Russian helicopters have been supplied to NATO countries before, Moscow is interested in this deal that sets a precedent for bilateral cooperation because the sides have never jointly armed a third country before.
On Wednesday, Rogozin said this deal implied more than assistance to Afghanistan and commercial equipment sales, that the deal also had political and economic implications.
The contract is expected to become Russia's contribution to supporting the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a NATO-led security mission in Afghanistan. Russia does not want the Taliban to regain power in Afghanistan. Unlike most of the other participating countries, it is interested in more effective efforts to combat the illegal drug trade because up to 80 metric tons of Afghan drugs are annually smuggled into Russia.
Vedomosti
Government wants to control state corporations, take over profits
State corporations should transfer part of their profits to the state budget, which will help to replenish it and to strengthen control over state corporations, the Finance Ministry said.
Relevant amendments to legislation are being drafted because currently state corporations do not pay anything to the budget as non-profit organizations.
The government will not necessarily take over the state corporations' profits, but it should have the right to do so when and if necessary, said Deputy Finance Minister Alexei Savatyugin. The decision will be taken individually for each corporation. Transferring part of the corporations' profits to the budget will replenish it and also strengthen control over them.
There are seven state corporations in Russia: the nanotechnologies corporation RusNano, Vnesheconombank (VEB), Olympstroy, in charge of construction of the 2014 Olympic projects in Sochi, Russian Technologies, the Deposit Insurance Agency (DIA), the Housing and Utilities Fund, the nuclear energy corporation Rosatom, as well as Avtodor, a state company established as a non-profit organization for road construction and maintenance.
According to their financial statements for FY 2009, DIA posted 26.3 billion rubles ($845.9 million) of net profit, the Housing and Utilities Fund 12.3 billion rubles ($395.6 million), RusNano 11.3 billion rubles ($363.5 million), Olympstroy 10.1 billion rubles ($324.9 million), Russian Technologies 70 million rubles ($2.25 million) and VEB 31 billion rubles ($997.1 million).
After inspections by the Prosecutor General's Office late last year, President Dmitry Medvedev proposed corporatizing a majority of state corporations.
Most state companies plan to pay at least 25% of their net profit in dividend. Using that figure as a yardstick, the federal budget would have received 22.8 billion rubles ($733.35 million) in dividend from the state corporations.
The profits transfer mechanism will be formalized in amendments to the law on non-profit organizations, which the Economic Development Ministry is drafting. Aimed at enhancing the corporations' effectiveness, the amendments did not initially touch upon profit distribution. The idea was proposed by the Finance Ministry only early this year.
Ivan Oskolkov, a department director at the Economic Development Ministry, said the economic significance of the idea is not to take over profits, but to have the possibility to regain part of budget allocations if the corporation changes its goals and no longer needs the money.
The government is scrutinizing the Finance Ministry's proposal; it has not yet made a decision, said Dmitry Peskov, the press secretary to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.
Last year state corporations posted huge profits because part of their funds had been deposited with banks or invested in securities, said Yulia Tseplyayeva from BNP Paribas. "They could diminish in the future, because the expenses of Olympstroy and RusNano will grow annually," she said.
In terms of additional revenue, the proposed measure will not be very effective, but it could be important for enhancing state control over state corporations, Tseplyayeva said.
According to Anton Danilov-Danilyan, head of the expert council at the public organization Business Russia, the government should take over the state corporations' profits selectively. For example, it can take over part of VEB's profits now but should wait until RusNano starts getting profits from its projects.
Izvestia
Dueling Internet legislation
Russia may get its first piece of legislation on the Internet as early as this fall. Two drafts of the legislation have been developed, one by a working group at the State Duma and the other by the Ministry of Communications and Mass Media. Which will be submitted to the parliament is still unclear.
An ad hoc working group was organized in the State Duma which developed amendments for the federal law on information, information technologies and the protection of information. These amendments concern parameters for the government regulation of activity on global computer networks, that is, via the Internet.
"This will be Russia's first serious piece of legislation on the Internet," deputy chairman of the State Duma Committee for Information Policy, Boris Reznik, says. According to Reznik, the development of this bill took a long time and involved many experts. Today, the Internet has become an integral part of many people's lives, but it has no legal framework. Current Russian legislation does not even define what the Internet is. So, this new bill is effectively an attempt to regulate the interaction of society and the government with the Internet.
Apart from defining general terms, such as "global computer network" and "website operator," the bill will set Russia's territorial jurisdiction, i.e., if a server is located somewhere abroad but the authors and moderators of a website are in Russia, they must abide by Russian legislation.
The bill also includes a direct ban on imposing out-of-court restrictions on citizens' and legal entities' rights and freedoms. A user's access to information may be restricted only by a court order. Thus, the State Duma backed the complete freedom of searching for information. The bill will also establish inviolability of property in the sphere of information technologies. At the same time, some experts point out that the bill makes no mention of some critical issues, such as the provider's liability for illegal content published on its resources.
The Communications and Mass Media Ministry has developed an alternative bill envisaging a stricter legal framework for the virtual space. For example, the bill will give broader authority to law enforcement agencies. According to the ministry's bill, an access provider will be obliged to suspend a domain on a substantiated request by a law enforcement agency and restrict a user's access to information if requested by a public prosecutor.
Both bills still have to be scrutinized by the legal departments of the Presidential Executive Office and the government.
Nezavisimaya Gazeta
Church-state social partnership
Specialized committees of the State Duma, the lower house of parliament, are currently preparing to examine the first version of proposed tax-code amendments aiming to streamline the taxation of non-profit organizations and charities.
On June 30, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met with members of the National Charity Foundation's trustee council comprising representatives of leading national religious organizations. The meeting served as a prologue for examining the bill.
Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Russia once again raised the issue of financial assistance to religious organizations, noting that their sponsors should receive tax breaks. The Russian Orthodox Church would like the state to provide direct aid to its charity foundations and to give incentives to the business community.
If adopted, the tax code amendments will grant tax breaks to patrons of the arts and provide greater freedom to publicly active non-profit religious organizations.
The Russian Orthodox Church's Moscow Diocese has already trained young people for charity work in parishes. The social services of Muslim and Judaic congregations are doing the same.
The Russian Constitution calls for creating a welfare state. However, this provision implies that the state should support socially vulnerable strata. At present, the state is shouldering some of its social burden onto religious organizations, primarily the Russian Orthodox Church.
Patriarch Kirill talked to President Medvedev on June 30 and expanded the concept of charity work, extending it to the actions of Orthodox Church priests who had tried to pacify the rebels during the recent ethnic clashes in Kyrgyzstan and the tragic events in South Ossetia. He said the brave priests deserved bonuses from a military personnel remuneration fund.
Consequently, religious non-profit organizations are becoming a parallel social security network with its own accounting system. A streamlined system of financial control over religious organizations should become the next step.
It is unclear whether this is good or bad for them. The redistribution of powers between the Healthcare and Social Development Ministry and parish-level religious non-profit organizations will primarily reduce the level of independence of the Russian Orthodox Church and other congregations from the state.
At the same time, churches, mosques and synagogues will no longer offer shelter to those in need and will turn into Western-style bureaucratic organizations and intermediary funds. A similar Western system is more effective in the bureaucratic rather than moral sense.
Selskaya Zhizn
Collective farms give way to large agro-holdings
With the Russian government's extensive support, large agribusinesses are making good progress and becoming hugely profitable.
Thanks to large-scale help, agriculture, which has been ruthlessly exploited for a long time, is now recovering. An injection of four billion euros enabled Russian farming to weather the economic crisis. Though industrial production in the country fell by 7.9%, agriculture grew by 3.7% last year.
The past two decades were extremely hard for the sector. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, many collective farms went bankrupt for lack of investment and the country just imported food. It was only in 1998, when a crisis hit and import food prices soared, that the approach to Russian farming changed. Now the government is trying to increase local food production from 60% to 85%.
Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has described agriculture as a strategic sector. This year, it will again get financial support - this time $5.5 billion. Subsidizing loan rates, setting floor prices and using import duties are the main instruments Putin wants to use to ease the agricultural progress. His strategy is working: about 50 large agro-holdings have been created in recent years, with some of them cultivating areas as large as the entire Ruhr region in Germany.
The sector is open to investors from any part of the world. This sets agriculture apart from such strategic branches as the oil or gas industry, which is difficult for foreign companies to penetrate.
Large Russian agribusinesses are now going abroad to look for talent. Prodimex, one of Russia's largest sugar producers, wooed the top four managers from its rival Nordzucker several months ago.
Russian firms are also large grain exporters. This is due above all to good crops and falling prices for cereals worldwide. The falling prices in traditional growth areas are evidence that Russia may become a major farm exporter in a few years' time. It is already one of the top five agricultural exporters.
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MOSCOW, July 8 (RIA Novosti)
