His ministry has joined hands with petroleum industrial experts to draft new patterns for mineral mining taxation on differentiated rates. Nothing has been done yet to blueprint required administrative patterns, though much progress has been made on the draft in its other aspects. The drafting team will join hands with the Natural Resources Ministry and other interested offices to see what to do about fiscal administration.
Present-day flat taxation discourages coal miners and oil-and-gas drillers, warned Mr. Gref. "We may pass the world's most perfect laws-but we shall be unable to implement them. True, what we have now may offer mining no encouragement, but, at any rate, the present pattern is transparent," he remarked.
"Flat taxation may fail to take the specifics of particular deposits, and a great many other factors into consideration-but it works! Practice has proved its efficiency," said Alexei Miller, chief of the Gazprom mammoth. Whatever other methods of taxation that may be taken up will offer negligible revenues, he added.
As Mr. Miller sees it, the company that discovers a deposit should be entitled to preferential rights of its development. That will promote corporate geological prospecting. He called for legislative confirmation of through licensing from prospecting to development.
Hermann Gref called State Councillors to pay attention to the Water and Forest codes as debates on their drafts are coming to an end. As far as the Forest Code goes, experts are discussing the pros and cons of private forest property. "We are ready to leave 99 year forest leasing intact unless the arrangement U-turns the situation," he said.
As for a mineral resources bill, a draft is ready, and his ministry will quite soon forward it to involved agencies. "We hope parliament will pass it during the autumn session," added Mr. Gref.
He insistently called to develop the petroleum and gas piping network. That is essential for the development of new oil- and gas-fields-and promises the Russian North another 200,000 or even more new job opportunities.
As the President of Yakutia, one of Russia's Siberian autonomies, was complaining, northern areas are exploited for other parts of Russia to gain. Hermann Gref sees his point, but says such exploitation also benefits offshore zones. Anyway, Russia has eventually to put an end to related economic methods.
"What we need is a unified concept of northern development," he stressed. Meanwhile, harassing the North is an abundance of desperately outdated bylaws, which clash with the acting social and labour legislation, said the minister, and called to abolish those notorious bylaws.
He appealed to regional governors to be active in efforts to streamline federal programme financing, so as to shift it to target patterns, and make it as fruitful as possible. It is high time to reconsider all available federal programmes, northern-oriented being no exception. The matter will be discussed in detail with the governors of all concerned areas, said Mr. Gref.
The Cabinet will do everything in its power for Arctic Sea Route trouble-shooting, and ensure all necessary supplies to the icebreaker fleet, he promised. A nuclear-propelled icebreaker has been under construction for several years now. It will be launched quite soon, said the minister.
Russia used to have a Council for Arctic Problems. Hermann Gref is determined to discuss the issue with other ministers. As he sees it, Russia needs the council reinstated at the federal governmental level.
There are blueprints for a network of basic airports to get straightened-out transit routes going via Russia. The project is estimated as fairly low-cost, with a mere billion US dollar total investment. The network will stretch all across Russia. Khabarovsk in the Far East, Siberia's Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk, Yekaterinburg in the Urals, Samara on the Volga, Kaliningrad and St. Petersburg on the Baltic coast, and Sochi on the Black Sea are entitled to top priority for airport construction, said Hermann Gref.
