The Governor attended a meeting of the State Council in the Kremlin

Governor Alexey Ostrovskiy attended a meeting of the State Council of the Russian Federation, chaired by Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Grand Kremlin Palace.

The meeting discussed measures to promote small and medium-sized business in the country, to make state support for small business more effective, to give entrepreneurs greater access to credit resources. Also, the issues of human resources and inspections of small and medium-sized businesses by supervisory agencies were raised at the meeting.

In his opening speech Vladimir Putin pointed out that the citizens are in no hurry to set up their own business. The Head of State said that the authorities should create all necessary conditions for the realization of entrepreneurs’ abilities.

The improvement of conditions for doing business should be felt already at the very first stage - starting a business. "The working group suggests simplifying the procedure for starting up a small business. I fully agree with this", - stressed the President, saying that starting a business should be easy, and one should not fear taking risks or making mistakes. "Instead of wasting time and effort collecting references and certificates, one will just need to buy a patent and start working", - said the Head of State.

Particular attention was paid to the issues of tax policy in relation to small and medium-sized businesses. Speaking about this, Vladimir Putin urged regional authorities to monitor the growth of the tax burden on business, which is associated with the new payments appearing due to the introduction of the cadastral value of real estate and property. Also, the Head of State reminded that the existing tax benefits have been fixed for the next four years. “I believe the regions should be reasonable here, there should be no radical increase of the tax burden for businesses, especially for companies involved in production and occupying large premises”, - said Vladimir Putin.

In addition, the President called for the regulatory authorities to reduce the number of inspections of businesses, and instructed the Prosecutor General's Office to analyze the validity of the inspections conducted in 2014, primarily the unscheduled ones. "Businesspeople should not live in constant fear that another inspection can occur any time and that any actions of theirs could be made subject to some fine or penalty", - said the President.

In the region, the subprogram to support small and medium-sized enterprises with the funds of the federal budget was successfully implemented in 2014. The total amount of funds allocated to support small and medium-sized businesses amounted to more than 282 million Rubles, including 61 million Rubles from the regional budget, 221 million Rubles from the federal budget.

It should be noted that Smolensk region applied for the allocation of federal funds and it was among the 20 regions the applications of which were fully satisfied by the Ministry of Economic Development of the Russian Federation.

66 small and medium-sized businesses received support within the subprogram. The number of successful applications, in comparison with 2013, increased by 47%. The total amount of grants provided to small and medium-sized businesses grew, in comparison with 2013, grew by 12.4%. It is noteworthy that the geography of participants expanded. Thus, while in 2013 there were entrepreneurs from the 13 municipalities participating in the contests, in 2014 there were 20 municipalities represented.

The priority is real support of small and medium-sized enterprises, companies engaged in manufacturing, construction, tourism, agriculture, scientific and technical development in the field of natural sciences and engineering.