Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with Rostov Region Governor Vladimir Chub
Transcript of the start of the meeting:
Vladimir Putin: How are you doing overall?
Vladimir Chub: Thank you for your decisions. I haven't often been at meetings where the prime minister's decisions were applauded. Thank you very much.
Vladimir Putin: This does not happen too often, does it?
Vladimir Chub: No, it doesn't. This practically never happens.
It goes without saying that regional growth has slowed somewhat from 111% to 108%. I think this is not a critical downturn. We continue building up housing construction - the commissioning of new housing grew over 16%. We have maintained trade and public food catering levels. I'm glad to say that blue-collar employment stands at 101%, although I understand that this is a tricky figure.
We do have problems. First, our regional budget is short of 2.5 billion roubles although the cities and districts remained within budget. A pessimistic forecast - this figure may increase to five billion. An optimistic forecast - we will stop at 2.5 billion roubles if we get through December. Probably, the true figure will be in-between.
By December 1 we had a surplus of 5.5 billion roubles in city and municipal district accounts. In the last two months we have cut the fat out of our spending, and frozen construction projects which were on hold. However, I have asked municipalities to keep this money so that we could get through January. After January we will analyse the year and the forth quarter and look at processes to make adjustments in our anti-crisis plans.
I mentioned it when we met in Yaroslavl, and will say it again that sometimes we are falling behind in carrying out measures which you have adopted in support of commodity producers, and budget-dependent employees, at the regional level. The same goes for the five percent profit.
As for your tax proposal for small business, we will discuss a reduction of profit tax from 15% to 10% on December 18.
Vladimir Putin: Will you fix the tax rate at 10%?
Vladimir Chub: Yes, we will fix it at 10% because there are two profit taxes. There is another one at six percent. If we go down to five percent, the second taxation system which the government and we have promoted would appear worse than the one which we have reduced. Therefore, we will cut the tax to 10% and will analyse the result. But we must do this before January 1. If on December 18 we submit this question to the legislative assembly, and it adopts the document, medium and small business will pay five percent less tax.
There are some questions on other companies in addition to those we have discussed regarding agricultural machinery production.
Vladimir Putin: Let's talk about this in more detail.
