Russian airlines asked to be exempt from excess profit tax

Russian airlines are asking to be exempted from paying windfall tax, as the industry is not super-profitable, said the deputy chief accountant for tax accounting of the airline “UTair» Viktor Sakharov during his speech at the St. Petersburg International Legal Forum.

“In fact, the profit that was received from subsidies in 2022 will be spent on the same maintenance of the fleet, somewhere it is possible for renewal, for the purchase of spare parts. With this in mind, the proposal from the industry is to still exempt aviation from this additional tax, because it is not a super-profitable industry,” quotes Sakharov Interfax.

According to him, the average profitability of aviation “rarely exceeds 2%, and in recent years it has been from 0 to 1%.” At the same time, as Sakharov noted, this is “the only industry where the tax burden is generally negative: that is, in fact, aviation receives more money from the budget than it pays to the budget.”

May 4 Izvestia wrotethat in 2023 the subsidizing of the program for the implementation of regional flights bypassing Moscow was reduced from 9 billion to 7.5 billion rubles. In this regard, airlines began to cancel domestic flights due to the reduction of state support. According to one of the sources of the publication, the Federal Air Transport Agency approached the issue “formally”, removing from the program those routes for which carriers have not yet concluded agreements on co-financing flights with regional authorities.

At the same time, the budget process in the regions is arranged differently, so some routes were signed only at the beginning of summer, he noted. As a result, most of the flights excluded from the program fell on the Omsk and Tyumen regions, Tatarstan, St. Petersburg, Dagestan and North Ossetia.

On the same day Rosaviatsiya promised maintain subsidized flights to socially significant destinations. The agency noted that it recommended that air carriers proceed from the principle of effective redistribution of budgetary funds and maintaining an acceptable level of availability of air transportation when revising routes.