April 21 (Bloomberg) -- Russia has already released its key tax breaks aimed at countering the economic crisis and there will be “no sensations” in tax proposals in the coming three years, a Finance Ministry official said.

“We believe taxes are one of the instruments for fighting the economic crisis, but they are not the main instrument,” Ilya Trunin, director of the ministry’s tax and customs department, told reporters in Moscow yesterday. “We think the main part of the anti-crisis program as far as taxes are concerned has already been implemented.”

The Finance Ministry has come under pressure from businesses to ease their tax burden as revenues slide amid the worst global economic crisis since the Great Depression. Last year, the government allowed companies to stagger their value- added tax payments, cut the profit tax and pared back mineral- extraction levies to help oil and gas producers as crude-oil prices fell from a July record.

Alexander Shokhin, head of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, the country’s big-business lobby, said last week that the government should cut taxes to boost production rather than dole out cash to individual companies.

According to the ministry’s proposals for the coming three years, which Trunin presented, oil companies should pay no extraction taxes for up to 15 years on projects in the southern Black Sea region and Far Eastern Okhotsk Sea region, or until total production reaches 20 million tons and 30 million tons, respectively.

Mechanisms for delaying or staggering tax payments would be improved, he said, while the companies that presented bank guarantees would be able to receive VAT reimbursements within 30 days.

Russia has also approved changes to a dual tax agreement with Cyprus, which, when they are ratified, will result in it being excluded from the list of offshore zones, Trunin said.

The agreement, signed by Russian and Cypriot financial ministries, will ban Russian companies from registering in Cyprus solely to receive tax breaks. The two governments will now also share confidential financial information about the Russian companies operating in Cyprus, Trunin said.

-- With reporting by Anastasia Ustinova in Moscow. Editor: Jones Hayden, James M. Gomez

To contact the reporter on this story: Alex Nicholson in Moscow at anicholson6@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: April 21, 2009 03:52 EDT