Mikhail Shamolin: “Stopping roundwood exports will not only increase processing within Russia but also deliver a serious blow to quasi-legal harvesting”

Mikhail Shamolin, President and Chairman of the Board at Segezha Group, spoke about the prospects of banning roundwood exports from Russia as of January 1, 2022 in an interview with RBC.

“It is undoubtedly a perfectly correct solution and we welcome it because the problem is not only the roundwood export itself and products thereof, since this directive concerns not only roundwood but also roughly processed sawn timber; roundwood has lately been subject to quotas, numerous entrepreneurs imitate sawn timber production, while in fact they make roughly processed timber or unprocessed high-moisture boards. Quasi-roundwood is shipped to China and the problem is, most of this material is harvested illegally or half-legally: no taxes are paid, environmental requirements are violated, reforestation requirements are not met. Stopping roundwood exports will not only increase the processing volume inside Russia but also seriously undermine quasi-legal harvesting and shady business,” President of Segezha Group commented.

Mikhail Shamolin didn’t forget to mention the subject of wooden houses construction: “There is a whole series of measures that could be worked out and adopted to make the market of wooden houses construction more legal. The key problem of the wooden houses construction market is its quasi-legality. The vast majority of individual residential houses are built by “off-the-books” crews from materials purchased in the markets where you cannot be certain about the origin of these materials… I believe that making this market legal and structuring it will not be such a big problem, while the benefits of developing the timber industry in Russia are going to be huge; the volume and production of materials for wooden houses construction and the construction of plant-manufactured wooden houses itself are extremely small and they can grow by dozens of times.”