Revisions to the legal framework regulating foreign investments in strategic branches of the Russian economy will be implemented by the end of 2010, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said on Friday.
Russia saw a 16% decline in foreign investment in 2009, Putin said at the EurAsEC intergovernmental council meeting. "This year we want to break this tendency, and to do this we are acting in several directions at once," he said.
"The issue is about improving the investment climate, abolishing abundant bureaucratic limitations, revising the legal framework that regulates foreign investment in strategic branches of the Russian economy," Putin said.
The development of natural resources, the nuclear, defense and aerospace sectors, fisheries - in all Russian law defines 42 spheres as strategic. Foreign investors seeking to buy shares in strategic businesses have to receive permission from the government, in the first instance the Federal Antimonopoly Service.
The prime minister said he did not exclude the possibility that customs duties on imports would also gradually come down, nor that other protectionist measures implemented amid the economic downturn would be eliminated.
Earlier, Putin said the government had not changed its position that protectionist measures in customs and tariff policies should be implemented cautiously and only in specific cases.
ST. PETERSBURG, May 21 (RIA Novosti)
