Travelers might be restricted to bringing only 20,000 rubles ($630) worth of goods into Russia without paying customs duties under a government proposal aimed at bolstering crisis-hit customs revenues.

The plan would lower the maximum value of goods from the current 65,000 rubles ($2,000) and reduce the goods’ maximum weight from 35 kilograms to 20 kilograms.

Travelers would have to show receipts for newly purchased goods, and anything over the price and weigh limits would be slapped with duties, according to proposed regulations posted on the web site of the Federal Customs Service late last month.

But the fate of the plan, which is drawing harsh criticism, appears to be very much up in the air. The Federal Customs Service has removed it from its web site, and a spokeswoman said Thursday that no one was available at the agency to discuss it.

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin met with customs officials Thursday evening in yet another effort to raise government revenues in the area. It was not immediately clear whether Putin discussed with the group the measures targeting travelers.

Experts said such measures would greatly hamper trade and barely help improve customs revenues.
Natalya Orlova, chief economist with Alfa Bank, said the sums were too small to effectively battle the problem of falling state revenues.

“This will just be an extra inconvenience for individuals,” she said.

She said that raising customs tariffs would result in making goods more expensive, which in turn was undesirable in a recession. “The initial problem is falling demand, and that is what causes gray imports to increase,” Orlova said.

The European Union, the country’s biggest trading partner and a prime destination for travelers, said that while it was legitimate for Moscow to fight illegal imports, the proposed price limit was unrealistic.

Denis Daniilidis, the EU delegation’s spokesman in Moscow, said 20,000 rubles is extremely low. “Russian visitors are very good shoppers who spend a lot of money. Now one pair of shoes or a camera would already be too much,” he said.

Putin spoke against gray imports at the meeting with members of a state border commission in Petrozavodsk, the capital of the northwestern republic of Karelia, which borders Finland.

“Shipments used to be practically outside proper controls when they moved from the border to customs points further inland, and this was capitalized on by dishonest businesses and semi-criminal elements,” Putin said, Interfax reported.

“These loopholes should now be closed,” he said.

Gray imports are typically goods that skirt the full customs levy by being declared at a lower-than-real value.

A major overhaul of the Federal Customs Service, which began last year and involved closing many smaller customs posts, has been mired with disorganization. In March, new terminals in the Moscow region saw long lines and chaos, forcing many companies to pay overtime fees.

Customs chief Andrei Belyaninov told Putin at a meeting Wednesday that the number of customs posts had been reduced from 45 to five in Moscow and from 56 to 12 in the surrounding region.

Hinting at excessive workload, he added that customs both in Moscow and in the Moscow region were working under a simplified regime, according to a transcript posted on the government’s web site.

Customs revenue from both exports and imports traditionally provides a significant share of the country’s state income.

Yet the largely oil-based revenue has plummeted by almost 40 percent this year.

In the first six months of 2009, customs contributed 1.3 trillion rubles to the budget, or a monthly average of 218 billion rubles ($6.85 billion), according to information on the customs service’s web site. In contrast, the customs service contributed an average of 391 billion rubles ($12 billion) per month in 2008, and a record 4.7 trillion rubles ($148 billion) for the whole year.

The government has reacted to this drop with a range of measures mostly focused on raising tariffs and increasing controls.