The stolen Lexus did not fit into the declaration

The administration of the Tomsk region is seeking to deprive Yevgeny Kaverzin, a member of the Yabloko faction in the Tomsk City Duma, of his parliamentary powers. The basis for this was the absence in his declaration for 2021 of information about a Lexus car stolen back in 2007, as well as about a number of bank accounts. The deputy considers the inaccuracies in the declaration to be insignificant, and explains the officials’ demand as a desire to “clean up” the City Duma. Last year, two Tomsk parliamentarians lost their powers under the “absenteeism law,” and another one will soon lose his mandate due to a verdict in a criminal case on extremism.

The Department for the Prevention of Corruption and Other Offenses of the Tomsk Regional Administration sent a letter to Evgeniy Kaverzin, a member of the Yabloko faction in the Tomsk City Duma, about the need to surrender his mandate. Mr. Kaverzin posted a photo of the document on his Telegram channel; on Friday the regional administration did not respond to Kommersant’s request about the authenticity of the document.

The letter, signed by the head of the department Andrei Yasoveev, contains an address to the addressee in the third person: “I propose to contact the local government body authorized to make the relevant decision with an application for early termination of the powers of the deputy of the Tomsk City Duma, Evgeniy Nikolaevich Kaverzin.” The department justified this proposal by the results of checking the certificate of property and income for 2021: in it, Mr. Kaverzin did not formally indicate the Lexus car he owned, which was stolen back in 2007. “Vehicles transferred for use by proxy, which are stolen… are also subject to indication in the certificate,” the document notes with reference to the methodological recommendations of the Ministry of Labor of the Russian Federation. The letter also states that the certificate contains information about a number of bank accounts.

Evgeny Kaverzin, in his explanations, said that the income data was entered into the certificate in accordance with statements from credit institutions, and the inaccuracies made were of a “technical” and not fundamental nature.

As for the stolen car, the deputy emphasized that he received insurance for it: “When the insurance company pays it, it must re-register the car in its name. Why she didn’t do this is a mystery to me.”

Mr. Kaverzin does not plan to voluntarily hand over his deputy certificate and is sure that the desire to deprive him of his mandate is of a political nature. “It’s just that the ‘guys’ decided that they could clean out the Duma, which can be called ‘protest’,” he told Kommersant, without specifying exactly whose desire he was talking about.

In September 2023, the Yabloko faction had already suffered one personnel loss, having been reduced to three people: the City Duma deprived Artem Kanarev, who had long left Russia, of his mandate. The reason for this was amendments to federal legislation, according to which the absence of a municipal deputy at meetings without good reason for six months in a row is grounds for early termination of powers. A similar sanction was applied to Andrey Fateev, a member of the Independent Deputies group. And in December, the Soviet District Court of Tomsk sentenced Ksenia Fadeeva, a city Duma deputy and ex-coordinator of the local headquarters of Alexei Navalny (the network of headquarters is recognized as an extremist organization, liquidated and banned in the Russian Federation), to nine years in prison in a case of extremism, and after the sentence comes into force, she will also lose mandate.

“Everything is known. We are fighting,” Vasily Eremin, the head of the Yabloko faction in the City Duma, answered Kommersant’s question about the reaction to the department’s appeal.

He called the claims of regional officials “shamefully bureaucratic.”

“Letter (from the regional department on the deprivation of powers of Evgeniy Kaverzin.— “Kommersant”) was, now we are obliged to bring this issue to the Duma for consideration,” reported Kommersant. O. Speaker of the City Duma Andrei Petrov (Communist Party of the Russian Federation). The next session of the Tomsk parliament will take place on February 6, its agenda has not yet been formed.

Valery Lavsky, Novosibirsk