The Kremlin has given major Russian business permission to ignore the votes of shareholders from so-called unfriendly countries this year as a method of fighting the effectiveness of Western sanctions.The decree, signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, specifies that the policies apply to huge companies in the energy, engineering, and trade sectors with owners under global sanctions or even those with minority foreign shareholders, supplying company turnover was over 100 billion rubles (about $1.5 billion) in the previous monetary year.The action comes as part of a series of procedures taken by the Kremlin to alleviate issues linked to rigorous Western sanctions on Russia imposed after the launch of Moscows military offensive in Ukraine.The heads of numerous Russian companies have recently suffered not being able to authorize their businesss yearly budget or to customize the composition of its board of directors for absence of a clear regulation on the validity of votes cast by foreign shareholders.The short-term procedure will stay in place up until the end of this year, after which companies will need to choose themselves whether to count votes made by hostile investors or not.Citing a source, the Russian news agency Interfax stated the regulations would affect around a dozen companies.Russia has enormously increased the number of nations it formally considers to have committed hostile actions versus Russia, Russian companies and people, in the previous year, from simply 2-- the United States and the Czech Republic-- in 2021 to 49 nations today, consisting of all 27 EU member states.