Tag Archives: lease

In Volgograd, municipality will cooperate with industrial enterprises in buying out land plots

“In Volgograd, municipality will cooperate with industrial enterprises in buying out land plots” (“V Volgograde munitsipalitet okazhet sodeystvie promyshlennym predpriyatiyam v vykupe zemel’nykh uchastkov”), Zem.ru, 28 September 2009.  26 July 2010 http://www.zem.ru/all/825/.

The state of land reform in Volgograd.  The Volgograd municipality is offering a discount price on land buy-outs, if purchased by enterprises before the end of 2009; the relative stability of land tax rates, as opposed to more in-flux lease payments, is another incentive to buy out, the article adds.  The city administration is encouraging full privatization of land since land taxes on private land help fill the city budget.  The 400 hectares of federal land, on which 15 large industrial enterprises are currently situated, currently add some 123 million rubles to the city coffers annually; if reformulated as rents from the federal government, the city will lose these monies.  Committee on land resources chairperson Irina Anisimova is pleased that 80 new enterprise land privatizations in 2008 were added to the total 290 privatized industrial land plots, though she realizes this momentum must be sustained.  Although city administration affirms its readiness to cooperate with enterprises in quickly formulating buy-out documents, disparities between Cadastral appraisal prices and market prices are sure to fuel disagreements over buy-out prices.

Land taxes increase 50 times over

“Land taxes increase 50 times over” (“Zemel’niy nalog podorozhaet v 50 raz”), Agentstvo “Kadastrovie Novosti”, 11 September 2009. Federal Cadastre Agency for Real Estate, Media Materials: 14 July 2010 http://r41.kadastr.ru/news/media/1059085/.

Reporting on land tax raises as a result of new Cadastral evaluations.  Land values in Samarskaya Oblast are up 40-60%, in Rostovskaya Oblast they have increased 5 times over, and in Smolensk Oblast they are up 47.7 times.  Rosnedvizhimost’ officers say that tax rates have not yet been adjusted to new market conditions coming after a peak in the land market in late 2007/early 2008.  A managing partner of Miller Samuell Real-Group says these taxes “will simply kill any proprietor and will place a cross on the back of any business.”  In Smolenskaya Oblast, values of land plots under industrial enterprises have increased 47 times, which specialists say will harm production costs, productivity of local industry, profits, and competitiveness.

Problems for other enterprises and administrative bodies have arisen: in Moscow, City Hall is threatening terminating developers’ contracts for residential construction on some 5 million square meters of land that Rosreyester is refusing to register.  The Moscow Oblast Forestry Management has gone against federal recommendations in completing some of its recent land transactions; similar forestry land-use scandals have taken place in Petersburg and Leningradskaya Oblast, as well.

Note: Recent (in action since January 2010) changes to the land tax code are outlined at http://taxpravo.ru/analitika/statya-71574-popravki_po_regionalnyim_i_mestnyim_nalogam_v_2010_godu.