Some of Russia’s richest businessmen voluntarily transferred about 220 billion rubles ($3 billion) to the state treasury, Russian economic weekly Expert reported on Monday.
Photo: SITA/AP, Vyacheslav Prokofyev
Russian President Vladimir Putin
An anonymous federal official told Expert that it could be about 300 billion rubles ($4.1 billion) by the end of the fiscal year, according to expectations.
Russian President Vladimir Putin asked invited oligarchs at a meeting in the Kremlin on March 26 to contribute to the country’s budget in an effort to stabilize state finances amid the ongoing invasion of Ukraine.
“One of the participants in the meeting said that he believed that they had to give a certain very large amount of money to the state. It was his family’s decision,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. He did not name the businessman.
A source close to one of the participants told Expert that this person was Sulejman Kerimov. According to The Financial Times sources, he promised 100 billion rubles, and the tycoon Oleg Deripaska is said to have also committed to the contribution.
The Expert weekly reported that businessmen are channeling their money to the Russian government through shell companies and corporate foundations in progressively smaller amounts.
Representatives of Sulejman Kerimov, Vladimir Potanin, Oleg Deripaska, the Ministry of Finance and the State Treasury did not respond to questions from the weekly Expert.
According to the government portal “Electronic budget”, as of May 27, the total amount of free payments to the state treasury from non-governmental organizations amounted to 220 billion rubles. The budget law assumed that revenues of this type for the entire year 2026 will reach 1.7 billion rubles.
Analysts told the magazine that this could cover about 15 percent of the ballooning budget deficit. The deficit from January to April reached 79.7 billion dollars (2.5 percent of GDP), surpassing the government’s original annual plan of 52 billion dollars ahead of schedule.
Bloomberg reported Monday that Russian finance ministry and central bank officials recently warned Putin that excessive war spending was creating a permanent hole in the budget.
