Ultraconservative United Russia lawmaker Irina Yarovaya said that mobile operators’ complaints about huge losses they are to face as new anti-terrorist laws come into force are “baseless,” the RBC news agency reported Tuesday.
“There is no reason to raise prices,” Yarovaya said, calling the claims a “forgery” made up in order to justify tariffs hike. The law does not specify volumes of information or timing of storage which are to be defined by Russian government within two years, she added.
Last month, four Russian top mobile operators — MTS, MegaFon, VympelCom and Tele2 — wrote a joint letter to the Russian Federation Council’s head Valentina Matvienko calling to revoke the amendments to Russian anti-terrorist legislation obliging operators to store their users’ data for six month.
According to the companies, expense of storage capacity would cost them 2.2 trillion rubles ($33.8 billion), lead to increasing tariffs and even affect the national budget as operators would not be able to pay their taxes in full anymore.
Officials will revise the laws if mobile operators prove that they would inevitably cause sharp rise in prices, said Federation Council member and co-author of the anti-terrorist laws Victor Ozertsov.
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