By the way, this achievement of ours is far more significant than the cancellation of the elections in Barvikha. It’s just more complicated, which is why Barvikha is at the top of Yandex News, while only Vedomosti is writing about this.
We—specifically Lyubov Sobol and Valery Zolotukhin—have long been doing extensive systematic work to fight the crooks who carry out no-bid procurement under the pretext of an “emergency.”
Over the past two years, this has turned into a widespread and fairly lawless phenomenon. For example, imagine you’re a minister and you want to buy felt boots worth 1 billion rubles.
Under normal circumstances, you announce a tender. A company close to you (Romashka LLC), a company not close to you, and anyone else can show up. They bid against each other and drive the price down. You start at 1,000 rubles per pair of felt boots, and during the bidding the price drops to 700.
That’s good for the budget, but not so good for you—how are you supposed to make money? So you declare: winter is coming, and we consider that an emergency. Because of this “emergency,” we’re buying felt boots from Romashka LLC without a tender at 1,000 rubles per pair.
You transfer 1 billion rubles to Romashka, and Romashka kicks back 100 million to your offshore account in the BVI (British Virgin Islands).
If you think I’m exaggerating about the felt boots, read Lyuba’s posts on the subject.
And *Vedomosti* gives examples too:
Do you see what I mean—no-bid elevator maintenance contracts and purchases of sidewalk paving tiles on the grounds of an emergency?
So our systematic work and the steady stream of complaints have produced results: procurement carried out under the emergency procedure has fallen by 23%.
Everyone did a great job, and Sobol especially. By the way, she’s currently running in Moscow’s Central Administrative District and has been going around courtyards campaigning very successfully. Once again, well done.