Reuters tells us that “Russia won’t help out Cyprus depositors.” Many observers of the Cyprus scene had been waiting for Russia to step in and help with the Cyprus fiscal crisis but it was not to be.
Russia’s leadership decline and left Western media puzzled about what was coming next. Now Russia’s reluctance makes more sense, given the reporting in this article – and others that are appearing recently as well.
What it comes down to is that Russian officials were as concerned about Cyprus as a tax haven as European ones were. The implication is that Russian officials were content to sit back and watch European pressure applied.
The Russian government will not aid businesses that have lost money in Cyprus, First Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov said, underscoring Moscow’s resolve to clamp down on the flight of capital to offshore financial centers.
Major account holders, many of them Russian, will lose up to 60 percent of their deposits over 100,000 euros ($128,400) at Cyprus’s largest bank under a European Union bailout to save the Mediterranean island from bankruptcy.
If Russians lose money “it’s a terrible shame, but the Russian government will not take any action in such a situation,” Shuvalov was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying in a television interview on Sunday night.
But if a large company, in which the Russian state was a shareholder, sustained serious losses then this could be reviewed on a case-by-case basis, Shuvalov added.
“If there is some kind of concrete situation, we would be willing to examine it – publicly, transparently, here in Russia, but for this it would not be necessary to assist Cyprus,” he said.
This is fairly clear. While Russian officials may be involved in a somewhat uneasy relationship with the West, when it comes to taxes, it’s obvious that there is not a large amount of difference between official perspectives.
This is noteworthy in a number of ways, and certainly when it comes to how Russia and the West are going to approach international affairs going forward. There will be issues that cannot be agreed on but in other ways the two sides will share similar outlooks.
When it comes to taxes, the perspective is obviously similar. Russian officials are no more apt to protect so-called tax havens than Europeans or Americans. And in this case, they made their stance clear by not interfering.
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