Income is not written to local legislators – Newspaper Kommersant No. 223 (7424) dated 01.12.2022
[ad_1]
A group of deputies and senators on Thursday plans to submit to the State Duma a bill on the actual abolition of the annual declaration of income and property for regional and municipal deputies working on a voluntary basis. If the amendments are adopted, this category of elected representatives will have to report only on large expenses, while information on the income of all deputies, including those working on a professional basis, will be published only in a generalized and impersonal form.
The bill, sponsored by the chairmen of the committees on legislation of the State Duma and the Federation Council, Pavel Krasheninnikov (United Russia) and Andrey Klishas, as well as deputies Valery Gartung (A Just Russia – For Truth) and Alexei Didenko (LDPR), provides for amendments to laws “On the General Principles of Organization of Public Power in the Subjects of the Russian Federation” and “On Combating Corruption”. According to these amendments, deputies of regional and municipal parliaments exercising their powers “on the job” will file declarations only before the elections, and after them – only in the event of a major transaction exceeding the total income of the legislator and his wife for the previous three years. . If the deputy did not have such expenses, it will be enough for him to report this without submitting a declaration. A similar procedure without annual declaration of income is now provided for the deputies of rural settlements. In addition, according to the draft, information on the income of all deputies (including those who work on a paid basis) will be published on the websites of legislative bodies in a generalized form, without indicating personal data.
“Now, due to the need to declare property, many people, especially business representatives, do not want to go to the legislature. This is an economic, social and political barrier, because declarations are often used to put pressure on candidates in elections. It seems to me that we need to reduce the headache for those people who want to work on a voluntary basis. Plus, personal data is private life, and it is better to present such information in a generalized form, ”Pavel Krasheninnikov explained to Kommersant the meaning of the initiative.
“If a person is not in the civil service, why should he declare his income? It is nonsense. I had a story when, at the request of the prosecutor’s office, a municipal deputy was deprived of his powers because he incorrectly filled out a declaration. And he worked as a watchman. And there are a lot of such incidents. Well, what is the fight against corruption? Valery Gartung told Kommersant.
The Communist Party faction does not agree with the arguments of the authors of the bill. “In my opinion, this contradicts the public nature of the deputy status,” Communist Mikhail Matveev told Kommersant. “Civil society, voters have an increased interest in disclosing such information. Deputies and officials take on additional obligations to society. And the question whether the deputy works on a voluntary basis or on a professional basis, in my opinion, is not decisive.”
Sardana Avksentyeva, deputy head of the New People faction, did not comment on the new amendments to Kommersant, citing the fact that she had not yet read the bill.
It should be noted that errors in declarations regularly become a reason for punishing regional and local deputies. For example, in February of this year, the well-known communist blogger Nikolai Bondarenko lost his mandate as a deputy of the Saratov Regional Duma, who did not report on his wife’s interest-free loans of 500 thousand rubles. And in July, the State Council of the Komi Republic removed the leader of the Communist Party faction Viktor Vorobyov (included in the register of foreign media agents) from a paid position due to the fact that he did not declare 711 thousand rubles.
Sometimes accountability becomes a problem for members of the party in power. For example, in July 2021, the deputy of the Trans-Baikal Legislative Assembly Marina Kirillova (“United Russia”) lost her mandate, having missed the deadline for the declaration campaign: she submitted documents not before April 1 and in electronic form, as required by law, but only on April 5 and on paper . And in February 2021, the Volgograd regional prosecutor’s office reported violations in the declarations of 11 out of 38 regional Duma deputies at once, including representatives of United Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and Just Russia. True, the supervisory authority did not disclose their names, and the results of this scandal were not reported.
According to the director of Transparency International – R, Ilya Shumanov (both the organization and Mr. Shumanov are included by the Ministry of Justice in the register of foreign agents), the permission not to declare income to rural deputies became “an erosion of the declaration system”, and even then it was clear that the process of expanding exceptions would go further . “In large municipalities, there are deputies who work on an unreleased basis, are engaged in commercial activities and, in fact, are lobbyists for their industries or specific enterprises. Based on this, information about their income and expenses is important for voters. Therefore, the exclusion of these persons from the number of declarants will affect the credibility of the government system and increase corruption risks,” the expert believes.
According to political scientist Rostislav Turovsky, the new bill follows the general trend of closing information in the political, financial and economic spheres. “It is no secret that there are already quite a few businessmen among the deputies, and it is precisely the current deputies who are not very interested (in disclosing information.— “b”), the expert explains. “They are often annoyed by the need to publish information, because there are a lot of rich and super-rich people among them, especially among regional deputies.”
[ad_2]
Source link
