The Ministry of Economy proposed to simplify the creation and regulation of personal funds

The Ministry of Economy has developed bills to change the regulation of personal funds – an analogue of Western private foundations and trusts. The authorities want to exempt these structures from inspections and reporting to the Ministry of Justice and allow them to invest in high-yield securities. However, funds will have to comply with anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing requirements.

What the Ministry of Economy offers:

• the decision to create a fund should be made not by the Ministry of Justice (the fund is registered as an NPO), but by the Federal Tax Service, by analogy with commercial organizations;
• exempt personal funds from the requirements imposed on non-profit organizations, including from the control of the Ministry of Justice;
• grant personal funds the status of qualified investors;
• beneficiaries will not be persons with frozen assets due to money laundering or terrorist financing;
• the founder must bear subsidiary liability for the obligations of the fund, and the fund must bear subsidiary liability for the obligations of the founder;
• one of the spouses can leave the founders at any time without the consent of the other;
• it will be possible to create and reorganize funds and change constituent documents only upon the application of a notary;
• a notary, and not the Ministry of Justice, will check that the property transferred to the fund is more than 100 million rubles.

Documents on amendments to Civil Code And other legislative acts published on the portal of draft regulatory legal acts. The amendments are expected to come into force on September 1, 2024. As noted in the explanatory note, the regulation of NPOs “does not fully coincide with the special nature of a personal fund as a mechanism created for managing the property of individual individuals.”

The Ministry of Economy reported RBCthat there are now 16 personal funds registered in the Russian Federation. As he writes Forbes, the co-owner of the Krasnoe & Beloe and Bristol stores Igor Kesaev, the family of the founder of the IT company Bars Group (part of Rostec) Timur Akhmerov, ex-State Duma deputy, founder of the SMP group Foat Komarov and businessman Khachatur Arushanov. By default, the names of fund founders are confidential, but the owners themselves can declare this publicly.

Deputy Head of the Ministry of Economy Ilya Torosov told RBC that simplification of regulation is aimed at “stabilizing the management of Russian companies and accelerating the transfer of assets to Russian jurisdiction.” According to him, amendments are being made based on the first experience of creating funds “for more professional and convenient control of the property transferred to the fund.”

Russians can establish personal funds from March 1, 2022. In essence, the foundation is a non-profit organization and is created by a citizen to manage their property. To create a fund, he needs to transfer property with a market value of at least 100 million rubles. After death, the inheritance of the foundation does not take place according to the rules of inheritance law, but according to the rules approved by the founder.

How the authorities simplified the regulation of personal funds earlier – in the Kommersant article “Preferential transfer included for capital”.

Leonid Uvarchev