The Federation Council, the Russian parliament's upper house, approved Wednesday a bill seeking to restrict foreign investment in strategic industries, ITAR-TASS reported according to Prime-Tass.
Under the bill, foreign private investors cannot get more than 50% in companies defined as "strategic" without government authorization, while foreign state-controlled investors cannot get more than 25% in strategic companies without government approval.
Foreign investors that already have more than 50% in a strategic company and seek to acquire more are exempt from the provisions of the bill.
Strategic industries include the nuclear, cryptography, arms, airline security, space, aircraft, television, radio, fishing and seafood industries, according to the bill.
They also include some natural monopolies, including some telecommunications companies, as well as monopolistic producers of metals used in the defense industry, large printing houses and large publishing houses, the bill reads.
The bill also applies to deposits of uranium, diamonds, pure quartz, some rare-earth metals, nickel, cobalt, tantalum, niobium, beryllium, lithium and platinum-group metals. Strategic natural resource deposits also include offshore deposits, as well as deposits with recoverable reserves of more than 70 million tonnes of oil, more than 50 billion cubic meters of natural gas, more than 50 tonnes of lode gold and more than 500,000 tonnes of copper, according to the bill.
To become law, the bill must be signed by the president.