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Semi-Dry or Semi-Sweet: It's All Natural
The Federal Customs Service and Russian wine importers have ended their conflict. The customs service will acknowledge semi-dry and semi-sweet wines as “natural” and not demand a higher excise tax for them. The disagreement arose over the interpretation of natural wine, which is defined inconsistently in the law “On State Regulation of the Turnover of Ethyl Alcohol and Alcoholic and Alcohol-Containing Products” and in the state standards 72-03 and 52-335-2005.
The customs service decided that wine containing additives was not natural, including semi-sweet and semi-dry wines, to which grape must is added.
That interpretation of the law would have increase importers' tax burden substantially. The excise tax on natural wine is 2.20 rubles per liter, while other alcoholic products are taxed at 162 rubles per liter of pure alcohol. That would mean a tax of about 15.80 rubles on the average 0.75-liter bottle of wine. On January 19, deputy director of the customs service Tatyana Golendeeva requested that the government determine a method of defining naturalness in wine. She sent a letter to customs inspectors on January 24, without receiving a reply to her inquiry, instructing them to begin taxing semi-dry and semi-sweet wines at the new, higher rate.
On March 14, Deputy Finance Minister Sergey Shatalov sent a letter to Golendeeva in which he disagreed with her interpretation of the law. On April 13, Golendeeva sent out a new letter reversing her previous instructions.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Apr. 17, 2007
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