Andrei Sheptiy, a Senior Associate with VERBA LEGAL’s Tax Advisory and Litigation Practice, has been asked by Forbes.ru to comment on the key tax risks arising when importing goods through intermediaries located in friendly jurisdictions.

Subjected to sanctions pressure, businesses engaged in foreign trade increasingly resort to using intermediary structures. However, such schemes tend to come under intense scrutiny by tax authorities.

According to the expert, tax authorities do not always consider it justified to have direct deliveries replaced with a more complex scheme involving intermediate parties. If this results in the tax burden being reduced, using such structure may be looked at as a way to derive unjustified tax benefit, which in its turn runs the risk of having the intermediary's margin classified as a payment of income subject to withholding tax in the Russian Federation.

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