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MOSCOW — The government will ease life for small businesses by simplifying their taxes and ditching a requirement that they must all use cash registers, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said Wednesday. The cutoff level for small businesses to get access to the simplified tax system will be raised to 60 million rubles ($1.77 million) in annual revenues from the current 30 million rubles, Putin told the All-Russia Forum on Small and Middle-Sized Businesses. The government will lose more than 100 billion rubles in taxes as a result, the Finance Ministry estimated. The simplified tax regime envisages an entrepreneur paying only one tax — either 6 percent of revenues or 5 to 15 percent of the net profit. |
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SMELLS LIKE VICTORY
Alexander Brlenky / The St. Petersburg Times
Soldiers take part on Wednesday in a rehearsal for the Victory Day Parade that will take place on Palace Square on May 9. A crowd of about a thousand passers-by gathered around the perimeter of the square in order to watch the rehearsal. |
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Three employees of St. Petersburg’s State Polar Academy — including a top administrator — have been arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill the academy’s rector after undercover police in the northern capital staged her murder. Law enforcement sources leaked information to news outlets on Tuesday evening that the rector, Kermen Basangova, 34, who is eight months pregnant, was stabbed by an unidentified attacker about 6:30 p.
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MOSCOW — A Novosibirsk court on Wednesday released on bail a U.S. businessman who has operated a chain of pizza restaurants in Siberia for more than a decade and is suspected of tax evasion, regional authorities said Wednesday. Eric Shogren, owner of the New York Pizza chain, is accused of failing to pay more than 9 million rubles ($263,900) in taxes, Novosibirsk regional police spokeswoman Tatyana Bukova told Interfax. |
All photos from issue.
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MOSCOW — A Moscow court on Tuesday granted parole to former Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, a mother of three whom supporters call a political prisoner ensnared in authorities’ attack on what was once the country’s leading oil company. The Preobrazhensky District Court granted early release to Bakhmina, 39, who was serving a 6 1/2-year term after being convicted in April 2006 on charges of embezzlement and tax evasion. She is one of several senior Yukos officials to be jailed since the company came under fire in 2003. Her bid to be released has become a cause celebre among prominent liberals and has even been backed by Kremlin supporters. |
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THE ART OF WAR
Alexander Belenky / The St. Petersburg Times
A woman examines one of the exhibits at the interactive "Samurai: Art of War" exhibition which opens at the Artillery Museum on Saturday. The exhibition runs until September 30. |
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Russian Museum Cuts ST PETERSBURG (SPT) — The Russian museum has had its federal funding halved, according to its director Vladimir Gusev. “We applied for 1.6 billion rubles ($47.5 million) of essential funding from the ministry of culture, but we have only been allocated 751 million rubles, 54 percent less than requested.” Interfax reported that the museum’s total budget allocation has been reduced by 20 percent from 2008 figures, accounting for inflation.
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A mix of business and pleasure, philanthropy and social networking — it’s hard to pin down Saturday’s International Jazz Benefit to just one form of personal indulgence or public good work. The Milost Foundation and the International Women’s Club of St. |
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Insurance fraud hit a high in the first quarter as a growing number of individuals felt compelled to take criminal measures to avoid paying off loans, Alexander Grigoryev, chairman of insurer Ingosstrakh, told journalists on Wednesday. |
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Prosecutors are under orders to bring the maximum possible charges against corporate executives who are delaying salary payments amid a sharp rise in labor law violations, a source in the Investigative Committee said. The Prosecutor General’s Office has been told to take a harder line on labor violations, including wage arrears, and some directors have already been arrested and punished. |
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 Nearly two months have passed since a second round of charges was brought against former Yukos CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky. The proceedings in Moscow’s Khamovnichesky District Court allege that Khodorkovsky somehow managed to embezzle not only all of the oil that Yukos extracted during the company’s existence but also laundered all of the firm’s profits, including everything Yukos paid to employees, invested in the modernization of equipment or searching for new oil deposits and the amounts spent on improving the social infrastructure of cities where Yukos was drilling for oil. |
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Federal authorities ended counterterrorist operations in Chechnya as of midnight April 16. Thank God for that. President Ramzan Kadyrov and his local forces deal with Chechnya’s problems much better than the forces sent from Moscow, which only infuriate the local population. |
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 Rock musicians have to get out and do something, rather than linger in their comfortable little worlds, says Mikhail Borzykin, one of Russia’s most politically-minded rock musicians. His band, Televizor, has just released a new album and is getting ready to showcase it at a large concert on Saturday that will also mark the local band’s 25th anniversary. |
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The weeks when SKIF, the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival, comes to town, are often the year’s most interesting and full. Headlined by acts like the indie rock band Deerhoof, Japan’s experimental noise rock/metal band Zeni Geva and ex-Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit, the festival also features a number of international and Russian acts that might be worthwhile. |
 Deerhoof, Zeni Geva and ex-Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit will headline the Sergei Kuryokhin International Festival (SKIF), which will be held in the city on Friday and Saturday. Although the festival has shrunk compared to last year’s event, it still offers exciting and diverse music, ranging from indie rock to complex musical experiments. |
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Reveling in a pleasing mixture of green, brown and beige, while besieging the diner’s vision on all fronts with butterfly shapes and pictures, as well as a somewhat misplaced garden gnome, Makhaon represents a fairly average (albeit excellently priced) restaurant offering Russian cuisine in the city center. |
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 BAGHDAD — At least 70 people were killed in two suicide bomb attacks in Iraq on Thursday as the military announced the capture of the Al-Qaeda chief in Iraq. In the deadliest strike, at least 45 people, including several Iranian pilgrims, were killed when a suicide bomber struck a restaurant in a town northeast of Baghdad, a military official said. |
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BEIJING — China paraded its warships and nuclear submarines Thursday in an unprecedented display of maritime might attended by 14 other nations to mark the 60th anniversary of its navy. |
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LONDON — Roy Keane’s eventful football career took another unexpected twist on Thursday when he was appointed the new manager of Championship club Ipswich. The former Manchester United and Republic of Ireland midfielder has signed a two-year contract at the Suffolk club, who sacked former boss Jim Magilton on Wednesday after it became clear that Ipswich had no chance of securing promotion to the Premier League this season. |
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SYDNEY — Former Davis Cup great Todd Woodbridge has criticised the International Tennis Federation’s insistence that Australia play a tie against India in Chennai despite security concerns. |
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