ARMENIA’S TOP 10 MAJOR TAX PAYERS

Tert
Oct 28 2009
Armenia

Though Orange Armenia will begin providing services on November 5,
it has already made the list of the ten leading major tax payers,
taking 10th place with an amount of 3.5 billion AMD tax paid.

Almost 95% of the amount was levied by customs bodies as a value added
tax (VAT) on imported goods. At this time, it’s not clear why in that
case the tax privilege wasn’t provided to payers, which states that
if the cost of imported equipment exceeds 300 million AMD paying tax
can be delayed by three years.

Another telecommunications company, Karabakh-Telecom, leads the list
of major tax payers by the amount of taxes paid over the period
January-September 2009 (12.7 billion AMD). For comparison’s sake,
over a 9-month period in 2008, Karabakh-Telecom paid 23.1 billion AMD.

Generally, the crisis had a different effect on the taxes paid by
major companies: in some cases, businesses paid more this year;
in other cases, less.

ArmenTel CJSC is the second on the list of major tax payers: it paid
10.7 billion AMD in taxes, about 6% less than the indicator of the
same period last year. ArmRosGazArd, which was the major tax payer
in 2009 by the half year indicator, is the fourth by the indicator
over 9 months.

Alex Grig LLC, which holds a dominant position in supplying butter,
juices for children, ethyl alcohol and other products, comes in third
place. The company paid 10.7 billion AMD tax this year. This is one
of the few cases when the amount of taxes paid increased by about
one third during a year of economic crisis.

In the 5th and 6th place on the list of major tax payers are Flesh
and City Petrol Group (legal successor of Kaghpetrolservice), both of
whom hold a dominant position in the area of importing fuel. Following
in the list are Armenian Energy Network company at 7th place, VIDIS
Distribution (distributor of Phillip Morris International in Armenia)
at 8th place, and International Massis Tabak at 9th place. Grand
Tobacco was ousted from the leading ten this year, falling behind at
11th place.