[1] In January 2017, the President’s assistant Vsevolod Yanchevsky, well-known for his liberal views, was appointed to lead the project of drafting a decree that would help create a more favourable environment for the development of the IT sector.
[2] On 13 March 2017, Alexander Lukashenko visited HTP residents and held a meeting with the managers, who voiced to the President the reasons why a legislative framework was essential to stimulate the growth of IT businesses and outlined their main ideas in this regard.
[3][4] A month later, on 21 April, in his annual address to the parliament and the Belarusian people, Lukashenko ordered to develop a new decree on the High-Tech Park, which would attract international companies engaged in the most promising areas — driverless transport, artificial intelligence, digital currencies.
[7] Denis Aleinikov, a Belarusian lawyer, is referred to as the main creator of the Decree, he and his company developed a legal framework for smart contracts and proposed to implement certain institutions of English law to boost venture capital financing in Belarus.
[14][15] Afer much debate, in September 2017, the draft was submitted to Alexander Lukashenko as a part of a package of liberal reforms of business legislation.
[16] The draft and the key points of the Decree were published in June 2017, welcomed by the members of the IT industry and harshly criticized by some economists.
[17] Critics opposed to the new decree argued that the draft's authors should have focused on the overall development of civil law reform so that the beneficial effect would influence all sectors of the economy; they criticized the orientation of Belarusian IT companies to foreign markets and argued that unmanned cars were irrelevant to Belarusian reality, that crypto-currencies could be risky economic bubbles, and that the technology of the blockchain is technically not legal, and is only applicable to the operation of cryptocurrencies.
[18][19][20] By the beginning of December, a document called the "Decree on the Development of Digital Economy" had been approved by all authorized official bodies and again submitted to the President.
[35] Media outlet Tut.by reported that due to one of the tax benefits provided by the decree, social benefits are charged to employers and paid to employees of IT-companies not based on their real salary (which is much higher than the national average), but are calculated and paid based on the size of the average salary in the country.