Putin Instructed To Impose An "excess Profit Tax" On Business
- 10.04.2026, 19:20
The Kremlin needs money to finance the war.
Despite the offer of Russian billionaires to voluntarily contribute to the budget to finance the war, the Russian government plans to impose an additional "excess profit tax" on large companies, Interfax reports, citing a source familiar with the discussion.
According to the agency's interlocutor, the instruction to prepare the new tax was given by Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. It is expected to amount to 20% of the amount by which 2025 profits exceeded the level of 2018-19.
The money will most likely have to be handed over to the treasury by gold mining companies, which earned money on record prices for precious metals, as well as metallurgists, a federal official told Expert.
The owners of key companies in the industry - Suleiman Kerimov, Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska - at a meeting with Putin on March 26 offered to voluntarily use their personal funds to finance the budget, which faced a sharp drop in oil and gas revenues at the beginning of the year. According to Expert's source, the three billionaires with a combined fortune of $44 billion, as estimated by Forbes, spoke of their willingness to transfer 460 billion rubles to the treasury. Despite this, the issue of the "excess profit tax" has not been removed from the agenda, the Expert's source said.
Although the war in Iran will bring additional oil revenues to the Russian budget, it will not completely solve the problem of the budget deficit, according to Freedom Finance Global analyst Vladimir Chernov. In January-March, the "hole" in the federal treasury reached 4.5 trillion rubles and exceeded the plan for the entire year. Budget expenditures have now been increased, Chernov emphasizes. And the Kremlin is considering an additional increase in spending on the war, sources told Bloomberg earlier.
Russian authorities have already introduced a tax on excess profits in 2023 - after commodity prices soared due to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. Then 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.
This time, gold mining companies have about 1 trillion rubles in excess profits, as the price of gold rose by 65% last year, economist Viktor Tunev estimates. "The only question is how much the state will decide to take," he emphasizes. Analysts at Sberbank CIB believe that an increase in the rate of mineral extraction tax on gold could bring 1 trillion rubles to the budget, and another 200 billion - an increase in mineral extraction tax on Nornickel's base metals.