Recently there has been a stable tendency to tighten tax legislation. This is especially affected by companies with the participation of foreign capital, which with some reservations include firms whose founders registered in offshore.
A vivid confirmation of this was the letter of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation No. 070332/687 of May 14, 2009, in which the department of Alexei Kurdir recommends that the auditors pay special attention and carefully carry out audit checks of organizations, counterparties or owners of which are persons/companies from certain countries and territories. In particular, this applies to offshores and countries that fell into the so -called “black” list of the FATF intergovernmental organization (a group of financial measures to combat money laundering), which includes Rosfinmonitoring from the Russian Federation.
In this document of the Ministry of Finance, all such companies are divided into several groups. The first group includes company and private entrepreneurs acting from offshores, as well as countries where information about owners and cash transactions is not provided for. The financial department, in particular, assigned Monaco, Andorra, Liechtenstein to such “undesirable” territories in Europe; Macau, Hong Kong, Brunei – in Asia; Mauritius, Seychelles – in the Pacific region (the full list of such countries can be found in order No. 108n of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation of November 13, 2007). The Ministry of Finance includes countries that do not perform or do not fully fulfill the recommendations of the FATF group (the full list is given on the official website that has a technical translation into Russian).