If you've read the Anti-Corruption Foundation's 2013 report, then you know that we've launched an investigations department. Pekhtin's resignation, Yakunin's offshore empire, Sobyanin's daughters' apartments, the Sosny dacha cooperative — all of that was our work.
The investigations department doesn't just know how to phrase a Google search properly (they even know how to use advanced search). The team digs through registries every day, checks public servants against open databases, and gets genuinely excited when they find something good.
Sometimes you help us with this. Remember that wonderful story about Sobyanin's daughters' apartments? The cherry on top, the third apartment belonging to the daughters of Moscow's acting mayor in a luxury new building on Kosygin Street, didn't come to us from Rosreestr (Russia's property registry) or the Unified State Register of Legal Entities database. Someone called the mayoral campaign headquarters call center and said, "Check address N — you'll like it." And we did.
And here's a more recent example: our investigation into the UFS system — Yakunin's scheme for pocketing money from every ticket sold — started when someone sent us a tip from a temporary email address at fbk@fbk.info. Naturally, we carefully check and verify all incoming information, and only then does it become the basis for an investigation. We received a lot of information during our major investigative project on construction in Sochi. We want more.
Now we have something new:
Blackbox, or the "black box," is a special service for sending information anonymously. We've worked to make sure everything is safe and anonymous. You no longer need temporary email accounts or SIM cards — you can send everything through a simple form.
All files are transmitted over a secure connection. We receive them, encrypt them, and send them to a protected server that only members of the investigations department can access. We do not store users' IP address data, and we do not keep logs (that is, we do not save any information about how long a user was on the site).
That means no one, under any circumstances, will ever be able to force us to reveal who gave us the information — because we ourselves won't know.
If you have something to share, do it at blackbox.fbk.info. Any information could be useful to us: know an official who owns a castle on the French Riviera? Write to us. Do you happen to have documentation of a kickback involving something built with state funds? Write to us. Has yet another Liksutov (a reference to Moscow official Maxim Liksutov) got yet another offshore company? You're very welcome. This is your contribution to the fight against crooks and thieves. A modest one, perhaps, but a very necessary one.
And a reminder: the Anti-Corruption Foundation covers its expenses with the money sent in by kind, decent people like you. Read about how we spend it, and send us more — it's an excellent investment.