A bill that provides for amending Russia’s Code of Administrative Offences to introduce significant fines for delay of cargoes and vehicles at customs has been submitted to the Russian State Duma, Business-TASS reports.

According to the document, officials will face a fine of 20,000 rubles (USD 612) and legal entities 200,000 rubles (USD 6,126 dollars) if a freight train or ship is delayed by one hour. If the delay is longer than one hour, the penalties will increase to 50,000 rubles (USD 1,500) and 500,000 rubles (USD 15,300), respectively.

If failure to meet deadlines results in delay of a vehicle by one hour, officials will be fined 10,000 rubles (USD 306) and legal entities 100,000 (USD 3,000). The fines will increase to 20,000 rubles and 200,000 rubles, respectively, if the delay is more than one hour.

If sluggishness results in delay of a container by one hour, the proposed fines are 20,000 and 200,000 rubles, respectively, increasing to 50,000 and 500,000 rubles, respectively, if the delay is more than one hour.

In addition, the proposed amendments introduce penalties for providing to the customs authorities false information about number of cargo packages, the markings on them, their names, and the gross weight or volume of foreign goods passing through the Customs Union on transit, as well as for use of false documents during transit.

The proposed fines for citizens are 1,000-2,500 rubles (USD 30-76) with or without confiscation of the goods. The fines range from 5,000 to 10,000 rubles (USD 153-306) for officials and from 50,000 to 100,000 rubles for legal entities. Goods may can also be confiscated from them.

The authors of this initiative are members of the United Russia party - the head of the lower house of parliament’s Committee on Transport, Yevgeny Moskvichev, and the committee’s first deputy head Vitaly Yefimov. According to them, the bill is important because of the "annual gravitation of 14 million cargo containers to the territory of the Russia Federation." "Of these, the potential capacity of Russia's transport system to handle this cargo traffic is currently around 4 million containers, with revenues of over USD 4 billion," the document states.