By Vestnik Kavkaza
The government has decided not to turn Crimea into an offshore entity: companies won’t have beneficial interests for dividends gained from companies’s work in Crimea and Sevastopol, Vedomosti reported. It was decided to stimulate real business: instead of offshore there would be a favorable tax regime for investments.
Experts say that foreign investors are not interested in offshore arrangements in Crimea for political reasons. The West didn’t recognize the joining of the peninsula to Russia.
However, Igor Morozov, a member of the Committee for International Affairs of the Federation Council, thinks that Russia’s right to Crimea is historically reasoned: “In 1774 the first Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca was signed. According to it, the Ottoman Empire gave Crimea to Russia. 9 years after, in 1783, the Treaty of Jassy finally assigned Crimea to the Russian Empire. Later it had always been Russian territory. When Khrushchev granted the territory to Ukraine, all legitimate processes were violated in a moment, including the USSR Constitution. And when in 1991 the USSR dissolved, then according to Union treaties, all territories which were included in the Union Treaty of 1922 had to belong to the countries which established the union. So we were sure that in 1991 Crimea had to become a Russian region, just like all the other constituents. But it didn’t happen.”
Referring to historians and international lawyers, Morozov stated that “when the right of a nation to self-determination is imposed on a historical right, the principle of international law could be legitimized under certain historical conditions by the society. And that happened.”
Morozov states that Russia was poorly involved in the process of initiation of the Crimean referendum, while a key factor was mobilization of Crimea’s residents against a nationalist threat: “I was in Crimea when the referendum was held. There was a passionate rise of Crimean residents, when they realized they could return to Russia. I remember that the whole of Crimea was involved in establishing self-defense forces to resist the nationalist, neo-Nazi armed groups of the Right Sector, they protected their cities and people. Russia was poorly involved in the processes for preparation of the referendum. It was initiated by Crimean residents. So it is improper to speak about the annexation of Crimea from a historical or other point of view.”
At the same time, Morozov stated that developments in the southeast of Ukraine could threat the security of Russia: “When we witness the formation of a corps of five thousand soldiers from Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Ukraine and it trains in Estonian military bases, we realize that as soon as it comes to the east of Ukraine, it will be 100 km from our border. We are concerned about these events. We can see contractors who are fighting in the southeast, they are from various European countries. We cannot be indifferent to the situation.”
