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In an effort to encourage delinquent companies to make good on their tax arrears, the St. Petersburg department of the federal Tax Ministry is adopting a carrot-and-stick approach. According to Maxim Prokhorov, head of the debt-restructuring department of the St. Petersburg branch of the Tax Ministry, nearly 30,000 local companies have not paid taxes for one or more years since 1998, with the total owed to the federal budget in unpaid taxes and fines totalling about 7 billion rubles (about $238 million). At the federal level, the Tax Ministry has set a national deadline of Dec. 1 for firms to submit plans for repaying their debts. Those that do not submit plans will be automatically forced into bankruptcy proceedings and shut down. |
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 Losing one's documents in St. Petersburg can bring on a whole world of problems. You may have difficulty leaving the city by train or airplane. You may not be able to drive your car, pick up your mail or receive your pension. |
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Latvian police and the St. Petersburg office of the Federal Security Service, or FSB, have denied accusations made by former FSB lieutenant colonel Alexander Litvinenko, who wrote in a recent book that the FSB was involved in the 1998 assassination of State Duma Deputy Galina Starovoitova. |
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MOSCOW - In an initiative that is sure to delight many Russians who are hoping to visit the United States but dreading the visa application process, the U. |
All photos from issue.
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 Former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov unexpectedly stepped down from his post as a faction leader in the State Duma earlier this week, drawing extensive speculation about the veteran politician's next move. Announcing his resignation from the chairmanship of the Fatherland-All Russia faction on Monday, the 71-year-old Primakov did not elaborate on his long-term plans, but he declared that he would not be quitting major-league politics. |
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WWII Wreckage Found VLADIVOSKTOK, Far East (AP) - U.S. experts have found the remains of at least two Americans who died when their navy bomber crashed into a volcano in Russia's far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula during World War II. |
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MINSK, Belarus - If it weren't for the clean streets and the road signs in Belarussian, Minsk could easily pass for a well-off provincial town in Russia. The books and newspapers sold in the newsstands all come in Russian. Most of the radio stations broadcast in Russian and play Russian pop songs. People mainly watch Russian television channels. |
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MOSCOW - The U.S.-Russia Investment Fund said Wednesday that it has reached an agreement to buy J.P. Morgan & Co.'s Russian subsidiary for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of the closed joint-stock company J.P. Morgan Bank will enable the fund's mortgage-lending arm, DeltaCredit, to raise more financing, lower mortgage rates and issue its own mortgage bonds and ruble-denominated mortgages, said James Cook, senior vice president of the fund and president of DeltaCredit, at a news conference Wednesday. "[The bank purchase] is really the key to issue mortgage-backed bonds and securities," he said. "Russia doesn't have to depend on foreign investors to build a mortgage market. |
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 MOSCOW - A day after his agency was given vast new tariff-setting powers, the head of the the Federal Energy Commission (FEC) said Wednesday that he was ready to start raising energy prices - a move that will have wide-ranging ramifications for the whole economy. |
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MOSCOW - The State Audit Chamber on Tuesday denied reports that a presidential decree had been drafted on the mandatory exchange of foreign-currency notes for new types of checks. Eduard Krustkaln, the budgetary watchdog's spokesperson, told Interfax on Tuesday that the Audit Chamber board had never seen such a draft. |
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MOSCOW - More than 150 of the country's biggest producers and consumers of electricity packed Moscow's World Trade Center on Wednesday to hammer out a plan to create Russia's first independently regulated wholesale electricity market. |
 MOSCOW - A top aide to President Vla dimir Putin on Thursday presented the government's long-awaited plan to liberalize the way Gazprom shares are traded, but market players and analysts were unimpressed, saying it left too many questions unanswered. "The government and the presidential administration advocate a cautious approach," AP quoted the plan's architect, Dmitry Medvedev, Putin's first deputy chief of staff, as saying. |
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MOSCOW - The boardroom scuffle at Mosenergo keeps getting weirder. Officers from the Interior Ministry's economic-crime department said Thursday that they had located the head of the Moscow utility's securities department, Natalia Khokholova, who had been reported missing since Wednesday. |
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THE recent expulsion of an American Protestant from the Russian province of Udmurtia - 1,100 kilometers east of Moscow - dramatized a trend that the Keston Institute had been observing for some time. Russian officials have been growing more and more likely to treat Western missionaries just as harshly as they treat indigenous Russian Protestants. |
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SINCE this is my last-but-one column for The St. Petersburg Times - "End of an Error" has probably been one of the most drawn-out farewells in history, but rest assured that it's coming to an end - I'm going to indulge in a quick trip down memory lane, back to the 300th issue of this paper, the first one in which I made an appearance, offering a review of "A Play Without a Name" at the Maly Drama Theater. |
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NOBODY likes talking about taxes. Nobody likes paying them. Everybody does their best to minimize their tax bill and, the unfortunate truth is, many are willing to stoop to illegal means. It is certainly no secret that many businesses and individuals have taken advantage of the confusion of Russia's transition since 1991 to opt out of their obligation to pay taxes. |
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IN Russia, terrorism does not conform to the norms that exist around the world. Here, acts of terrorism occur as and when it suits the interests of the powers-that-be. |
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WE are tempted to laugh at the increasingly farcical battle between Anatoly Chubais and Alexander Remezov for control of Moscow's heat and power supplies. But there is too much at stake in the struggle for Mosenergo, which entered a critical phase Friday, exploding into the kind of high political drama that provides valuable insight into the complexity and ambiguity of post-Soviet Russia. |
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 Figa, whose best-known band Nordfolks split up early last year, recently resumed his erratic punk career. He will release Nordfolks' self-produced full-length concert video later this month and will celebrate his 28th birthday with an all-night concert at Front that will highlight his various projects. |
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The term malinovy zvon, which Russians use to describe beautiful bell ringing, is unlikely to evoke any associations with a small town in Flanders. |
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The Moscow street-musicians' festival, which is said to have discovered some new talent, arrives in St. Petersburg on Sunday. Called Sounds of the City, the festival is trying to attract audiences by billing Leningrad, Markscheider Kunst and Selyodka as "guests" on its promotional posters. |
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I dread it when visiting friends ask me to recommend a good Russian restaurant. The problem is that such restaurants are hard to find in this city, strange as that may sound, and I usually send them somewhere Georgian instead, hoping that for the casual visitor, "ex-Soviet" and "Russian" are essentially the same concept. |
 For the past several years, millions of Russians have woken up with Andrei Malakhov, host of the "Dobroye Utro" (Good Morning) talk show on ORT, which airs from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. Many have also spent their afternoons with Malakhov, who hosts a second talk show, "Dobry Den" (Good Day), each Friday on ORT. |
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The true artist, as the Russian "imaginist" poet Vadim Shershenevich observed in the 1920s, is the one who, when confronting a burning house, grabs his colored pencils instead of the fire extinguisher and sketches the burning house rather than put out the fire. |
 "Planet of the Apes" is the least surprising movie of the summer. It's not only that after the original 1968 film, four sequels plus two television series, everyone who cares knows the underlying material, it's also that the sensibility of its director is equally well-known and twice as predictable. |
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Fujimori Charges LIMA, Peru (Reuters) - Peru's attorney general has filed murder charges against exiled ex-president Alberto Fujimori, a move seen helping the country in its bid to bring the former leader back from Japan for trial. Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi said he hadn't heard "about specifics" of Wednesday's charges, but that Tokyo would respond to any extradition request in accordance with Japanese law. |
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A Long Paddle LONDON (Reuters) - A former British soldier has become the first person to paddle across the Atlantic in a kayak, landing in Ireland after a marathon 75-day crossing. |
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