Mathematics is a wonderful thing.
Here I am, sitting through yet another hearing in the Kirovles-2 case and reading an interview with Nizhny Novgorod Mayor Ivan Karnilin.
He has acknowledged that we were right on the facts: yes, the Miami apartments exist; yes, they belong to the family; yes, they are worth $2 million. And yet he keeps trying to pull the wool over our eyes with talk about the divorce and claims that he earned this money legally:
The phrase “I could have earned all this over 60 years” is brilliant in itself. As if to say: why are you bothering me? I could have earned it, so that means it’s all legal.
But let’s not nitpick and instead look at the clearer explanation: For the last five years I worked in the private sector as a deputy director.
To earn $2 million over five years, Mayor Karnilin would have had to make $400,000 a year, or $33,000 a month.
His income was 65,000 rubles a month (about $1,800 at the 2014 exchange rate). His savings in 2014 amounted to 1.4 million rubles (about $39,000).
On top of that, in income tax alone (13%), he would have had to pay $4,200 every month. Over the full five years, that would come to $252,000.
And it’s almost frightening to think how much Karnilin’s employer would have had to pay in social contributions.
Only in that case—and only if Karnilin had spent those five years neither drinking nor eating nor buying clothes—could he have “saved up” for the Miami apartments.
Now the oversight bodies—if they actually want to investigate anything—need to do something very simple: a) check whether Ivan Nikolayevich paid taxes anywhere near that enormous amount over five years, and b) verify whether he had anything close to such an enormous legal income.
You and I both understand perfectly well that the answer is no. There won’t be anything even remotely close to those kinds of legal income figures.
What’s interesting is that everyone around him understands this too (just read the comments on the website of *Komsomolskaya Pravda*, a popular Russian tabloid newspaper). Officials understand it as well. And yet this feeble explanation is still treated as sufficient. The thought of resigning does not even seem to occur to Karnilin.
We are waiting for responses to ACF’s official letters. And don’t forget to sign up if you believe we need a country where officials are required to give a more thorough accounting of their sources of income: https://2018.navalny.com/