OREANDA-NEWS. March 4, 2008. For some reason Russian legislators of all levels usually at first write a law and only then assess its consequences. This situation has occurred in a number of Russian regions which passed new laws prohibiting organization and holding of main gambling games. It emerged that illegal gaming business remained untouched, but taxable legal venues were stubbed, so no taxes could be collected anymore. At that gambling operators tax payments formed a significant part of regional budget revenues, and it is quite hard to do without them (whatever populists said eagerly promoting gambling prohibition half a year ago).

Nowadays more and more regions strive to charge the federal government with their budget revenue missed due to the hastily adopted ban. Needless to say that local legislators keep silent about local gambling laws, pretty often populist ones. Those lawmakers prefer to pretend that the local budget deficit has been provoked by the Federal Law No. 244 (“On state regulation of the gambling and betting industry…”). Well, in fact they are not so wrong.

So Ryazan Regional Duma deputies decided (just following their colleagues from the Republic of Khakassia) to support an official proclamation of the legislative assembly of the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic to the Chairman of the State Duma and to the Prime Minister concerning indemnification for the lost gambling business tax revenues. If an adequate compensation is not provided, the regions which will impose the restriction on the gambling industry, will have to cut their budget expenditures proportionally.

Therefore the Kabardino-Balkarian Republic parliament appealed to the federal government with a proposal to turn regional gambling business tax into a federal tax and afterwards to distribute tax proceeds among regional budgets.

In other words, the Russian federal government is advised to withdraw gambling industry tax revenues from the regions where gambling zones will be located (Kaliningrad Region, Rostov Region, Krasnodar Territory, Primorye Territory, Republic of Altai) and divide such income between the other regions. Thus it is supposed to recover losses caused by implementation of hasty laws which were adopted by the same lawmakers who now promote such proclamations. Essentially Ryazan legislators just followed the appeal to “seize and redistribute”.