This is President Medvedev.
He is very concerned about the country’s procurement system — both public procurement and procurement carried out by state-owned (or semi-state-owned) corporations, monopolies, and so on. He expresses these concerns through talk. Now let’s see how things are actually done. On Friday, the relevant State Duma committee, led by a representative of the Party of Crooks and Thieves (a derogatory nickname for the ruling United Russia party), recommended for second reading the draft law "On the procurement of goods, works, and services by state corporations (companies), natural monopoly entities, and public utility organizations." Unfortunately, this event passed with very little media coverage. (Only Vedomosti really wrote a good article about it.)
Secret Buyers Dmitry Medvedev’s intervention has resulted in state companies being allowed to conceal information about most of their procurement, impose any requirements they want on suppliers, and make those decisions impossible to appeal to the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS). Vedomosti has obtained the version of the draft law on procurement by state companies (state corporations), their subsidiaries, and sub-subsidiaries prepared for the second reading. Read the full article
And that is a serious mistake. This law will regulate sums an order of magnitude larger than the 5 trillion rubles in state procurement — that is, more than 50 trillion rubles. And the proposed regulation is basically of the "we steal, smile, and wave" variety. The crooks in state companies will make the date this law is passed their professional holiday. For example, procurements containing commercial secrets will not have to be published on the website. At the same time, the customer itself decides what counts as a secret and what does not. Needless to say, the amount of top-secret “commercial secrecy” will increase a hundredfold. SUDDENLY, spies from competitors will be found everywhere. Procurements under 500,000 rubles (0.5 million rubles) also will not be published (in the version passed in the first reading, the threshold was 100,000 rubles). In principle, the provisions on a contract registry have been removed. Anyone who wants to find information about Gazprom’s procurement, Olympstroy’s, and so on (myself included) can forget about it. And so on. I’ll write a separate post about this and ask the guys from RosPil (Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption project focused on public procurement) to comment on the draft law. For now, read Vedomosti and think about what kind of President we have if, on his instructions, draft laws are being passed that contradict the very purpose of those instructions. Update. Really, the whole meaning of what is happening is perfectly captured by this brilliant quote from the article: Russian Railways’ procurement is already as transparent as possible, according to a Russian Railways representative.