Declarations of State Duma deputies and senators will no longer be published from 2023

Declarations of deputies and senators will not be published as early as 2023. This was reported to Vedomosti by an interlocutor in the State Duma Committee on State Construction and confirmed by its chairman Pavel Krasheninnikov.

According to a source in the committee, from this year only generalized information about the declarations of parliamentarians will be published – how many declarations were submitted, how many were not submitted, whether violations were revealed in them, etc. “That is, it will be general statistical information,” he says. But data on the income of deputies and senators, as well as their real estate (as well as members of their families) will no longer be published.

Krasheninnikov told Vedomosti that they would stop publishing information from March 1.

Parliamentarians must report on their own income and property, as well as on the property and income of family members, including minor children, by April 1. Deputies and senators submit this information to special commissions of the respective chamber of parliament. There, the completeness and reliability of the information is checked, as well as compliance with the restrictions and prohibitions that apply to parliamentarians. For example, they are prohibited from having accounts abroad.

On December 29, 2022, President Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the specifics of the performance of duties, compliance with restrictions and prohibitions by certain categories of citizens during the period of a special military operation. One of the paragraphs of the decree says that the posting on the Internet of information about income and property, which are provided in accordance with the law “On Combating Corruption” and other federal laws, “is not carried out for publication.” Whether this applies only to those who are directly involved in hostilities, or to all who are required to provide declarations, the decree does not say.

Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov, after signing the presidential decree, said that he had received a lot of questions from journalists on this topic: “And I did not answer a single one. I’ve been waiting for you to read the decree. It is absolutely clear from the decree who this concerns. This applies to those who work in the territories. Right there there is no room for any double interpretation. You just need to read it carefully, notice all the commas, periods, colons, etc.”

According to the declarations for 2021, which were published in April 2022, the representative of Kamchatka Valery Ponomarev became the richest senator – 4.2 billion rubles. Of the deputies of the State Duma, the richest member of the Communist Party faction Vladimir Blotsky – 3.5 billion rubles.