The Ministry of Economic Development is drafting proposals for establishing an international barter exchange, according to its Key 2024 Outcomes and 2025 Priorities draft plan, RBC reports.
The Ministry expects that the new digital platform will help connect counterparties for barter transactions between Russian businesses and companies from friendly countries. In foreign trade, bartering will become an additional channel for exporting Russian products while avoiding dependence on the banking infrastructure.
“In fact, a project to support an international private barter system became my first consulting project in the financial sector in 2004,” Professor Artem Genkin, CEO of Consulting & Analytical Union, says. “Back then, we encountered a problem. Barter transactions were perfectly legal under Anglo-Saxon laws, but they very difficult to fit into the domestic legal framework. Even now, as far as I know from foreign trade practitioners, a few factors still stand in the way of a wider introduction of bartering, such as the imperfection of Russian customs laws (the cumbersome accounting and paperwork such transactions entail) and the extremely negative attitude to bartering on the part of state authorities in China.”