Non-Licensed Mining

The President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, signed amendments to the law on the subsoil.

Users of the subsoil are legal persons, whose share of the State or entity in the capital stock together amounts to at least 50 per cent, and may extract satellite minerals (taken together with the principal licensed) without a license.

According to the law, companies now have sufficient knowledge of the State ' s industrial significance of the stocks of satellite minerals that have been distributed, and the necessary changes will be made to the existing licence.

State expertise may be carried out at any stage of the geological study of deposits, provided that the geological material submitted to the State for the examination enables an objective assessment of the quantity and quality of stocks Mineral Resources and other conditions for their extraction.

Exemption from satellite minerals is made up of byput waters, hydrocarbons and general minerals.

Amendments shall enter into force 90 days after the official publication of the law.

In addition, the federal subdivisions exclude those that contain massculine and technogenic deposits of diamonds and metals of the platinum group, uranium, diamonds, particularly clean quartz, rare terel, nickel, cobalt, tantalium, thiobia, berilla, lithium, metals of the platin group.