Putin Banned Billionaires From "eating Up" Excess Profits From Iran War
- 26.03.2026, 22:09
Earlier, the dictator of the Russian Federation offered oligarchs to voluntarily discount for the war in Ukraine.
Large businesses should not succumb to the temptation to "eat up" the additional export revenues that have arisen as a result of rising prices for raw materials. This was stated by Vladimir Putin on Thursday at the congress of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the country's largest business association with billionaires from the Forbes list on its board.
"Now, when quotations for our traditional exports are rising, but the markets are also "feverish," there may be a temptation to take advantage of the situation, to get market revenues and, as they call it, to "eat them up," to spend them on dividends or, as for the state, to inflate budget expenditures, budget spending," Putin said.
He added that "it is necessary to remain prudent" and show "moderate conservatism" in both corporate and state finances.
The war in Iran, which has driven up oil prices, has brought Russia record raw material revenues since April 2022: last week the economy earned $2.458 billion from oil exports - 120% more than in the week before the U.S.-Israeli strikes began.
The government does not rule out the introduction of a tax on excess profits (windfall tax) in a number of industries, said, speaking in the State Duma on Thursday, the head of the Ministry of Economic Development Maksim Reshetnikov. "Because on a number of positions, probably, now the prices are at levels at which few people assumed, whether they can be there at all," he said. - We need to correlate all this with the investment cycle in these industries in order not to jeopardize the initiated projects. That's why we are ready for dialog here" (quoted by Interfax).
Russian authorities have already introduced a tax on excess profits in 2023 - after commodity prices soared due to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. At that time, mining companies and metallurgists paid a total of about 300 billion rubles, while oil and gas corporations and the coal industry received an exemption from the windfall tax.
Besides oil and gas, Russia can earn money on fertilizers, points out Andrei Sizov, CEO of Sovecon. Russian producers control 23% of the global supply of ammonia fertilizers, 14% of the global urea market, and almost 40% of the potash market together with Belarus. Urea prices have jumped 44% to $670 per tonne because of the Iranian crisis, for example, says the Financial Times.
"Russia is one of the main beneficiaries [of the war] as a major producer of commodities, but that's just the way it is - it's not just oil and gas, but fertilizers as well," Sizov notes. - As you move down the supply chain of agricultural products, prices are also rising, and Russia has quite large reserves."