What an astonishingly convenient system they’ve created.
You catch a crooked official lying on his disclosure forms and breaking the law. That official’s colleagues hold a secret meeting and decide that he did nothing wrong. The crooked official then sues you, demanding 3.5 million rubles (about US$38,000) in “compensation for emotional distress” and closed court hearings. To justify his position, he says, “I was reviewed by a city hall commission” (see point 2). And when you try to obtain the minutes of that city hall commission meeting, it replies: “commercial secret, we cannot provide them.”
Imagine that—we had thought that city hall commission meetings had at least some public-law character, not to mention an anti-corruption commission, which by definition is supposed to explain its decisions to the public openly and transparently.
Reading about “third-party secrets” is especially laughable against the backdrop of the Sobyanin mayor’s office’s (Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin’s administration) remarkable efforts to organize the illegal wiretapping of candidates’ campaign headquarters, the results of which they dump into the media without the slightest embarrassment, along with materials from searches of candidates’ homes and offices, which also appear in the media just hours after the searches, and so on.
And you ask why they need a system in which candidates who ask inconvenient questions are kept off the ballot. That’s exactly why: so that, across all 45 seats in the city legislature, there won’t be a single deputy who would dig into these minutes.
Thieves protect their secrets.