Elena Kilinkarova has provided her comments to Delovoy Peterburg about recent trends in Russian legislation on deoffshorisation

On 22 September, business newspaper Delovoy Peterburg published an article (in Russian) titled 'Relocation to St Petersburg. The crisis has lured Russian capital away from offshore'. The article includes the assessments of lawyers on the success of reforms to Russian tax legislation to combat offshore jurisdictions and the law on the amnesty for returning capital and tax-free transfer of liquidity. Delovoy Peterburg explained to what extent St Petersburg businesspeople have made use of the instruments provided by the government.

Elena Kilinkarova PhD, Counsel and Head of the Tax department at Maxima Legal, one of the experts quoted in the article, commented that "the amnesty for returning capital has become a much less successful project than the project for deoffshorisation as a whole". Elena also noted that whilst there is stable interest in the rules on the amnesty of capital, the service for preparing the declaration necessary for participation in the amnesty has been largely unused.

Against the background that in 2017 a number of governments began the automated exchange of information about bank accounts, in 2016 and 2017 businesses expressed a significant interest in Russia's potential participation in the automated exchange of information and the consequences of this. Despite Russia being a signatory to a treaty to the relevant organisations on the automated exchange of financial information since May 2016, the next steps on the implementation of the changes has not taken place as quickly as had been expected. The bill for introducing the necessary changes to the Tax Code was presented to the Russian Parliament, the Duma, only in July 2017 and is currently being debated.