For the third day in a row, the media have been discussing Medvedev’s ban on buying luxury cars with budget funds.
A lot of people have written to me saying, basically, congratulations—they’ve admitted that the Anti-Corruption Foundation (ACF) was right. Two years ago, ACF collected 100,000 signatures in support of a bill banning officials from having cars worth more than 1.5 million rubles.
However, I can’t say I’m satisfied. Or rather, I’m pleased that our position has been vindicated politically, but I’m extremely unhappy with how this has actually been implemented. What’s happening is yet another demonstration of the wretchedness and uselessness of Medvedev’s government, which ought to be kicked out without delay.
Look: under the adopted government resolution, starting January 1, 2016, officials were restricted from purchasing cars costing more than 2.5 million rubles and with engine power above 200 horsepower. But here is the key point that people are overlooking: the ban applies only to the purchase of cars; it does not extend to rentals or leasing, nor does it cover the procurement of transportation services (a car with a driver).
And those last schemes are exactly what senior government agencies, the State Duma (the lower house of Russia’s parliament), and other lovers of a luxurious life at the public’s expense have been using for more than two years already.
That means that in 2014, more than 4,808,597 rubles in budget money was spent on transportation services for a single deputy. And since the cars were not purchased but rather obtained by “ordering transportation services,” this practice will continue after 2016 as well, regardless of Medvedev’s resolution.
Moreover, the purchase ban applies only to cars with gasoline engines.
The reason is that the government resolution specifies OKPD code 34.10.22, which narrows the interpretation of the prohibitive provision:
Let’s look at the OKDP classifier:
So diesel cars or electric vehicles are no problem. You can safely go ahead and buy a Tesla for $120,000.
So Medvedev’s initiative is complete nonsense**, and no one will actually fall under this resolution.** Those who used to buy cars will simply switch over to renting them. And it is very likely that budget spending will actually increase, because a car is purchased once, while rentals are paid for every year.
But three years earlier, the Anti-Corruption Foundation had already proposed closing off all loopholes completely.
In our bill, we included rental, leasing, and other contractual arrangements, and we did not limit it only to gasoline engines. We proposed setting the threshold at 1.5 million rubles.
How did that happen? Are we really that much smarter than Medvedev’s government? No—the whole issue is the real objective. And here the difference is enormous:
ACF: to make sure officials do not spend huge amounts of budget money on official transportation.
Medvedev’s government: to create the appearance of doing something, spend a year drafting and coordinating paperwork, and then leave everything exactly as it was.
That is why I always say: the issue is not the professionalism of officials, but their political motivation and the political will of their leader.
I am absolutely convinced that if Medvedev’s government were dissolved tomorrow and the vacant positions were filled with randomly selected graduates and postgraduate students from decent universities with grade averages of 4.5 and above, the quality of the government’s work would improve by 50%.
And if you replaced Medvedev’s useless little functionaries with ACF staff, it would improve by 1,500%. Though the math is not entirely straightforward here—how do you measure an increase in the effectiveness of a body currently rated at zero across the board?