FOREIGN TRADE BARRIERS | 357
unclear responsibilities of their boards of directors, misalignment of managers’ incentives and company
performance, inadequate control mechanisms on managers’ total remuneration or their use of assets
transferred by the government to the SOEs, and minimal disclosure requirements.
A specific variant of SOEs, state corporations, are completely owned by the government and operate under
separate legislation and in a marketplace distorted in their favor. For example, state corporation holding
structures and management arrangements (e.g., senior government officials as board members) create
conditions for preferential treatment, while the case-by-case legal construction of state corporations (by
virtue of their separate legal framework) leaves much scope for discretion and lobbying by company
insiders at the expense of private enterprises. There are six state corporations: Rosatom, VEB, Fund for
Communal Housing, Deposit Insurance Agency, Roskosmos, and Rostec.
In August 2021, the Russian Government extended by two years the implementation of the 2020-2022
Privatization Program. In December 2022, the Government extended the program through 2025, with plans
to fully privatize 23 federal state unitary enterprises and sell its stakes in 151 joint stock companies and 9
limited liability companies by 2025. As of December 2022, the Russian Government still maintained a list
of 44 SOEs with “national significance” that are either wholly or partially owned by Russia and whose
privatization is permitted only with a special governmental decree, including Aeroflot, Rosneft,
Rosneftegaz, Transneft, Russian Railways, and VTB. However, Russia has been slow in implementing the
privatization plan. The treatment of foreign investors in privatizations conducted to date has been
inconsistent, with foreign participation at times confined to minority stakes, which creates concerns about
protection for minority shareholders and corporate governance.
OTHER BARRIERS
Export Policies
Notwithstanding its stated intent of reducing export duties following its accession to the WTO in 2012, in
2022, Russia began to impose various export restrictions on a wide variety of products. For example, in
March 2022, Russia imposed a temporary ban on exports of over 200 industrial products, including
technological, communication and medical equipment, vehicles, agricultural machinery, and electrical
equipment. That list was later narrowed to 100 products. The list will be in place through the end of 2022.
In addition, notwithstanding the global food security crisis, Russia has imposed temporary export
restrictions (e.g., export bans, export quotas, or export duties) on sunflower seeds, soybeans, grain crops,
white sugar, raw cane sugar, rice and rice cereal, rapeseed, millet, buckwheat, meslin, cereal and cereal
pellets, crude flour, barley, rye, corn, onions, garlic, turnips, sunflower oil and bagasse, fish products, sulfur
used to produce sulfur-containing fertilizers, sulfur containing fertilizer, nitrogen-containing fertilizer, as
well as on non-agricultural products such as certain types of logs, ferrous waste and scrap, stainless scrap
and waste, waste and scrap of other alloy steel, and waste and scrap of tungsten.
Historically, Russia has maintained high export duties on crude oil to encourage domestic refining. Since
2019, Russia has gradually reduced export duties on crude and oil products, and plans to abolish them fully
in 2024. At the same time, Russia has been raising its oil-extraction tax. Furthermore, Russia plans to
continue its oil-tax maneuver that envisions a gradual decline in its oil exports duty and an increase in its
mineral extraction tax. The change will make domestic crude more expensive for domestic refiners.
Separately, Russia maintains a 30 percent export tax on natural gas. Stakeholders claim that Russia has
placed higher rail freight rates on certain raw materials intended for export, contrary to its WTO
commitment to eliminate discrepancies in such rates by July 1, 2013.