Peskov: The Kremlin is not aware of the retroactive deletion of income declarations by ministries

Presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he did not know why data on officials’ incomes for previous years had disappeared from the websites of some ministries. He said that the Kremlin did not delete the data, but they would not be officially published this year. This decision was made in accordance with the December decree of Vladimir Putin, allowing officials not to publish declarations.

During the press call, Kommersant FM noticed that data on the income and property of officials was removed from the websites of the ministries retroactively. In particular, declarations for the last 15 years have disappeared from the websites of the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr. Peskov said that “you need to contact each specific ministry and ask why such a decision was made.”

“I don’t know anything about deletion in recent years, we didn’t delete anything from our site … As for not publishing this data this year, yes, a document (decree of the president.— “b”) contains these formulations, and as far as the presidential administration is concerned, we handed over all those who were supposed to submit declarations to our respective control units on time,” the Kremlin spokesman replied.

According to him, now the submitted declarations are being studied, but their publication is not planned. “The entire base for anti-corruption work is preserved, this work continues, consistently. Here, the main thing is not the publication, but that this declaration is submitted to the relevant authorities, ”Dmitry Peskov assured

Amendments to the legislation allowing State Duma deputies and senators not to publish their income and property declarations came into force on March 1. Nothing was said about the removal of old declarations in the presidential decree. Source “RIA Novosti” informedthat the Federation Council will not publish information from the declarations. On March 31, Just Russia—For Truth published declarations of all its State Duma deputies from its faction. Deputy head of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation Nikolai Kolomeytsev promisedthat all deputies of the faction in the Duma will also publish declarations.

Read more about the loss of data – in the material “Kommersant FM” “Declarations out of sight”.

Laura Keffer