The development of entrepreneurship in Russia faces many difficulties. After the dissolution of the USSR, entrepreneurs became participants in many legal relations. It means there is always a threat that in some cases their rights may be violated. “Business is tired of various checks and bulling, according to commercial directives. Our law-enforcement agencies and officials must stop threatening business,” these are the words by the president Dmitry Medvedev in 2008, which have turned into a smart aphorism.
In 2012 the president of Russia established the institution of business ombudsman.
Boris Titov, the Russian President’s Authorized Representative for the Protection of the Rights of Entrepreneurs, said that in 2015 the institution worked even more intensively than in the previous year, because the number of calls we received increased by 50%. The main problem is still the prosecution of business, and the number of these cases among others is more than half.
“Many of them are not supported by us. We have a lot of applications that we check through the center for public procedures ‘Business against corruption’ and other centers of expertise in the region, and not all are supported, not all. But those that are supported, we are for them till the very end,” Titov said.
The ombudsman has to deal with administrative issues as well. “There were unusual situations, such as the appeal of the pharmacy chain, which struggled from patent trolls. And we, participating in the courts, were able to resolve this issue. As a result of our work with the prosecution, we managed to change the situation with the payment of the state order at least for some companies. That means that the case of the payment delays was solved due to the special prosecutor's office checks, the identification of non-payments, delays in payment, so we managed to return more than one hundred million rubles to entrepreneurs,” Titov stated.
Meanwhile, according to him, there are still a lot of problems in the system. “In addition to the work that we do every day with calls, we have to deal with systemic issues, and we work in the field of criminal law changes and enforcement in the area of changes to the laws relating to the administrative regulation of business,” the ombudsman said.
