I really love stories like this. They’re instructive and inspiring (I mean that without irony), and they answer the frequently asked question: “How can I carry out an investigation in my own city?”
This is Raushan Valiullin, who lives in the city of Naberezhnye Chelny in Tatarstan (a republic within Russia).
(Raushan is on the right, holding a balloon)
I met him when he came last summer to volunteer on an election campaign. He worked conscientiously for several weeks in the group preparing meetings with voters, and believe me, that’s pretty exhausting work.
He’s just that kind of good person with an active civic stance. A local opposition politician.
Quite recently, on my Twitter, staff from the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) posted a link to a guide by Andrei Mishchenkov from RosPil called "Find Your Courtyard on the Public Procurement Website."
Raushan went looking. And right away, instead of a courtyard, he found an interesting procurement listing:
On February 26, 2014, the public procurement website posted a “Notice of procurement from a single supplier (contractor, provider).” The executive committee of the city of Naberezhnye Chelny needed “the organization and performance of the art project group ‘Tenors of the 21st Century’ at an event dedicated to the March 8 celebration at KAMAZ OJSC” http://zakupki.gov.ru/epz/order/notice/ep44/view/common-info.html?regNumber=0111300000814000008
The contract price was 1 million rubles.
According to the documentation, for that money the organizer was supposed to provide the following services:
- Services for organizing the performance of the art project “Tenors of the 21st Century” — 555,600 rubles
- Fulfilling the hospitality rider — 153,000 rubles
- Fulfilling the technical rider — 186,000 rubles
- Taxes — 105,400 rubles.
Obviously, a concert like that could not have gone unnoticed by city residents: there would have been coverage on the mayor’s office website, on KAMAZ’s site, and in the local media. But nowhere—not on http://nabchelny.ru/, not on http://www.kamaz.ru/, not from the city’s mayor, nor from State Duma deputy Kogogina, who attended the event—did Raushan find any glowing reviews of this 1 million-ruble concert.
The procurement was marked as completed on the very same day it was posted—February 26, 2014—and even in the very same minute: 15:13 http://zakupki.gov.ru/epz/order/notice/ep44/view/event-log.html?regNumber=0111300000814000008
Next, Raushan dug into the contract’s contractor and found out it was a certain V. V. Yelkin, who a year earlier had been detained and arrested in Kazan while receiving a 5 million-ruble “bribe” (commercial bribery) (!!!) http://www.bimru.ru/newsofday/rumors/9217-Mesto-dnya.-Kontsertniy-direktor-Nadezhdi-Babkinoy-hotel-kinut-kazanskuyu-firmu-na-pyat-millionov
After that, Raushan did two simple and brilliant things:
a) he checked the performance schedule of the group “Tenors of the 21st Century” and saw that on that day they were performing in Moscow.
b) he simply called the “Tenors’” concert manager, and the manager confirmed that no such concert had taken place.
And just like that, with a phone, a computer, and civic initiative, Raushan caught the local crooks stealing a million rubles. The Anti-Corruption Foundation was happy to prepare criminal complaints for him to submit to the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor General’s Office.
He wrote about what he was doing on Facebook. You can read those posts in chronological order—they’re quite interesting:
Good man, right? Let’s follow his example. If we had a thousand people like Raushan across the country, we’d be living very differently.