Originally Posted by
southside bobby
Just regarding the AFL western build fleet I always understood the leasing companies themselves insist on VP/VQ registration as then they are more easily recoverable under international law in the case of default etc.
Aeroflot (and every other Russian major airline) use overseas registrations because there is a substantial Russian import tax on non-Russian manufactured aircraft. Their onetime A310 fleet used French registrations.
Politically, it would be seen as bad news to announce removal of the tax, which would be made much of by opposition both inside and outside the government among the large numbers who remember the days when everything was Soviet made and there were many aircraft factories, which with their adjacent cities now lie idle. Better to just not apply it to aircraft registered outside the country. Nobody realises the tax is not being collected anyway. So it says VP instead of RA on the back of the aircraft. So what. They are non-Cyrillic alphabet hieroglyphs anyway.
Other countries (Italy is one) do indeed have legal lease recovery issues that cause the lessor to register the aircraft elsewhere; Ireland is popular for these. A number of Latin American airlines have new aircraft registered in the USA for similar reasons.