‘Platon’ comes to Neptune

RF Government has approved the rules for collecting port investment dues at seaports of the Russian Federation. RF Ministry of Transport expects the new dues to cover the deficit of port infrastructure financing estimated at RUB 7-8 billion per year.

Investing under orders

In compliance with the RF Government Decree, investment dues  will be collected at seaports from foreign-going ships and will be approved by RF Transport Ministry and the Federal Antimonopoly Service for each year of a regulatory period. The dues will be collected by economic entities responsible for the development of federally-owned infrastructure facilities at seaports. In most cases, it is FSUE Rosmorport. Interestingly, this enterprise is being prepared for conversion into a joint stock company.

The idea of the investment due is similar to the Platon system earlier established for the automobile transport. It is intended to ensure additional off-budget financing for the development of port infrastructure, especially in remote and less attractive ports.

As press center of RF Transport Ministry comments, “the due is necessary as a source of financing of key projects on the development of port infrastructure specified by strategic planning documents (such as comprehensive plan for upgrading and expanding core infrastructure), for which no budget financing is foreseen while other sources of financing are not sufficient (for example, private investment initiative in the framework of public private partnership). When developing the document on new port due its collection was planned from 2019. Current demand for additional financing of port infrastructure (in the part of federally-owned facilities) is about RUB 7-8 billion per year. The new due is expected to cover the deficit of required investments”.

Andrey Lavrishchev, General Director of FSUE Rosmorport earlier said that it would be reasonable to collect this due in 14 seaports:  Big Port St. Petersburg, Primorsk, Ust-Luga, Vysotsk, Murmansk, Novorossiysk, Tuapse, Taman, Vostochny, Nakhodka, Vladivostok, Prigorodnoye, Vanino, De-Kastri. 

Investment dues will be determined basing on ship’s metric tonne capacity according to the ship documents (with a special clause on capacity of tankers with segregated ballast tanks). Upon a Harbour Master’s decision, no due is to be collected when ship makes a repeated call, a call without loading/unloading operations or a transit call.

A clause “provided that federally-owned facilities intended for servicing of ferries, passenger ships and passengers are included in the Programme” means that vessels of the mentioned types are subject to port only dues intended for construction of port facilities needed for servicing of such ships. For example, if there is a plan to build passenger port facilities (and those facilities are included in the programme of capital investments) the due can be imposed on passenger ships. The collected resources can be used exclusively for construction of planned passenger port facilities.

The document specifies that investment dues can be only spent on implementation of projects nut financed by the federal budget in cases when total capital investments exceed RUB 300 million. Also, those projects should obtain state expert approval.

Vitaly Chernov

Pros and cons of investment dues at seaports were covered in our earlier article >>>> 

RF Government Decree is available in Russian >>>>