The Russian government has scrapped a major impediment to the growth of its business aviation sector. A punitive import tax on private aircraft was lifted last week, according to Russia Today. The tax had driven many Russian business people to register their aircraft outside the country but that’s expected to change and also boost sales. Russia is seen as major market for business aircraft because of the lack of convenient transportation to its resource-rich hinterlands.
Dexter, the country’s first air taxi operation, didn’t wait for the tax to be lifted and paid the duties on its first seven aircraft, proving the market exists for these kinds of services. “We’ve made some kind of a revolution. We bought foreign aircraft, we registered them under the Russian flag, we paid VAT and custom duties and now people are able to use foreign aircraft, well-proven, very comfortable,” Dexter owner Eugene Andrachnikov told Russia Today. As he described in a podcast interviewat EBACE 2008,
the market has already been proven in Russia and the growth of his company is expressed by his order of 25 PC-12s and 20 Citation Mustangs.
