Legal Regulation of the Minimum Amount of Mandatory Investments Made by a Foreign Company during Redomicilation in the Russian Federation

The subject of the study is the legal norms regulating the amount of investments accompanying the procedure of redomicilation of a foreign company to special administrative regions of the Russian Federation. It is established that the current procedure for determining the minimum amount of mandatory investments prevents the expansion of the practice of redomicilation of foreign organizations into the Russian jurisdiction: the lack of differentiation of the amount of investments entails a disproportion (inequality) in their legal status. As a result, the redomicilation procedure in the Russian Federation looks more attractive for larger companies than for smaller ones (which reduces the interest of the latter in using it).
The hypothesis is proposed that, in its current form, the fulfillment of the obligation to invest in the economy of the Russian Federation is a «property encumbrance», which by its legal nature is equivalent to a measure of responsibility and acts as a kind of indirect sanction.
To eliminate identified shortcomings, a methodology has been developed for differentiating the minimum amount of mandatory investments based on the sum of the following two variables: 1) the value of assets of a redomiciled foreign company; and 2) the amount of assets of Russian organizations controlled by it. At the same time, it seems impractical to completely abandon undifferentiated amount of mandatory investments — a certain fixed amount of investments must be included as one of the components in their final value. The proposed model will make the minimum amount of necessary investments more equitable and will provide a proportional investment burden for both larger and smaller foreign companies (which will restore equality of their rights and legitimate interests in the process of redomicilation). In the study, analytical and hypothetical-deductive methods were used.

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