The Russian Ministry of Economic Development has prepared amendments to the rules for granting subsidies to lending institutions to compensate for their shortfall in income on loans issued in 2019-2024 to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and the self-employed, Kommersant reports.

They propose to limit the issuance of too large concessional loans to small and medium-sized businesses and the self-employed and close access to them to violators of the rules of such lending. Thus, the department proposes to refuse to grant subsidies for loan agreements concluded in 2019-2021 for more than 500 million rubles with organizations from the category of "microenterprises" in the field of construction, as well as engaged in professional, scientific and technical activities.

Subsidies will be deprived, among others, of those organizations whose information was excluded from the unified register of SMEs in 2019-2020.

The draft decree also introduces certain conditions for banks. Among them is the possibility for the client to refuse additional services of the financial organization for a fee, which are offered when granting a loan. In addition, if during the implementation of the subsidy program in previous fiscal years the authorized bank has not achieved or exceeded the result of the subsidy, the planned volume of loans may be reduced and the limit of subsidy to the credit institution for the next fiscal year will be reduced.

Thus, the authorities plan to reduce the average size of SME loans and focus on the segment of the smallest borrowers for maximum coverage by the state support of those who really need it.

It is specified that in May this year additional 8 billion rubles were allocated to subsidize concessional lending to SMEs and self-employed within the national project "Small and Medium Entrepreneurship and development of individual entrepreneurial initiative". Thus, the issuance of loans to SMEs and the self-employed must reach at least 530 billion rubles.

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Author: Karina Kamalova