Paul
Goble
Staunton, May 3 – An investigation
by Transparency International into electoral practices in Altay kray found that
because of gaps in Russian electoral law, tax money and even funds from foreign
firms are paying for the campaigns of some candidates even though both of those
things are nominally illegal in the Russian Federation.
The report is available online (transparency.org.ru/images/docs/research/2016-03_Altay_PR.pdf)
and represents an extension of the report TI prepared a year ago for Russia as
a whole (golosinfo.org/ru/articles/74151). One author of the new
report, Stanislav Andreychuk, gave an interview to Radio Liberty (svoboda.org/content/article/27711734.html).
Andreychuk describes the way TI
documented the flow of tax money from government offices to various
publications which then carried articles favorable to this or that candidate,
usually but not always from the ruling United Russia Party. Often this illegal
transfer of funds was covered by the use of intermediary firms, thus making it
more difficult to trace.
Another way government officials
hide what they are doing, the TI investigator says, is to give firms contracts
for completely unrelated projects and then require the recipients to transfer
part of the money they have received to the campaign coffers of this or that
preferred candidate. Such arrangements are hard to prove, but they exist,
Andreychuk continues.
In addition, money for Russian
candidates is coming in from abroad, sometimes but not always from companies
owned by Russians who want to avoid taxes or who don’t trust the Russian legal
system and something that is completely illegal, as are arrangements to pass
government money through one or another NGO for candidates’ election campaigns.
What is particularly worrisome,
Andreychuk suggests, is that sometimes firms are not simply supporting
candidates they approve or but are investing in people the authorities are
ordering them to back or doing it as a kind of “business exchange,” thus
blurring the line between public and private still further.
Over the last few years, he
continues, there has been little or no improvement in Russian electoral law or
practice; and consequently, he predicts that all of the faults TI has seen in
the past will be repeated, especially given the weaknesses of the electoral
commissions and the lack of connections between the Central Election Commission
and the tax authorities.
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