Actually, no. Not a year, but a little more than that—we held off on this “anniversary” post until the announcement about the Foundation. At the end of January 2011, I announced a fundraising drive for the RosPil project. For those who don’t remember the backstory, let me remind you: it all started with “Mr. Eyebrows”. Thanks to the uproar in the blogosphere and the media, several tenders by the Ministry of Health and Social Development were canceled, worth more than 100 million rubles (about US$3.4 million at the time). After that, we began receiving letters with information about potentially “rigged” tenders. At first, all of this information was handled by the project’s future coordinator, Konstantin Kalmykov. We were thinking about how best to formalize all of this and turn the fight against “kickback schemes” into a systematic process. If our California-based friend Pavel Senko hadn’t built a website for the project, we’d probably still be sitting around thinking about “the best way to do it.” In short, without Pavel, the RosPil project might never have happened at all. Over the course of the year, the project account received more than 8.7 million rubles. In March 2011, RosPil hired its first lawyer. At the moment, five people work on the project: in addition to coordinator Konstantin Kalmykov and lawyers Lyubov Sobol, Andrei Mishchenkov, and Konstantin Terekhov, since the second half of March 2012 we have had another lawyer on probation—Yanina Vlasenko. Yana graduated from Siberian Federal University and completed a master’s degree at the Higher School of Economics. It was Yana who handled the Moscow paving-tile story on RosPil’s side. Here is her working spreadsheet LiveJournal Twitter As originally stated, the project’s main and only expense category was payment for the services of specialists (lawyers and the project coordinator). The first payments were made in May 2011. In total, from May 10, 2011 to February 2, 2012, 3,436,181 rubles and 94 kopecks were withdrawn, including taxes, insurance contributions, and Yandex.Money system fees. Areas of the project’s work. Legal work directly related to tenders. Before moving on to specific results, I need to say a few words about how the mechanism works. First, we receive information about potentially “rigged” tenders. We verify this information, including by bringing in experts who can assess the price and the technical specifications. As a rule, the “rigged” nature of such procurements formally shows up in the documentation as provisions aimed at restricting competition. These may appear in the technical specifications, the draft contract, or other parts of the tender documentation. In this sense, our task is to ensure the legality of the tender by removing these restrictions and thereby minimizing the possibility of embezzlement or kickback schemes. In other words, we use the available legal mechanisms to provide equal opportunities for all participants in potentially “rigged” tenders. That is why one of the main indicators is the number of substantiated complaints:
Over the year, the number of substantiated complaints amounted to 60–70% of the total number of complaints filed. For comparison, among all complaints considered on the merits by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) in 2011, this figure was 45%. Here is an example for the third quarter; the situation was similar in the others:
At the same time, in more than 90% of cases, the contracting authority either made the necessary changes to the documentation or canceled the tender. In every case where the contracting authority ignored the antimonopoly authority’s decision and went ahead with the tender, we kept working: procurement for the production and broadcasting of informational TV programs covering socially significant issues in Tomsk Region in 2011. From July 7, 2011 through November 2011, we filed one complaint and two appeals regarding the actions of the Tomsk regional FAS office and the contracting authority. As a result, on December 23, 2011, the FAS of Russia ruled that the contracting authority’s actions violated the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition” and said it would consider holding those responsible administratively liable. Andrei Mishchenkov, who worked on this tender, wrote in more detail about the whole story. procurement for information services using copies of the Consultant Plus legal reference systems. The request for quotations was ultimately carried out. However, information about the contract never appeared on the website. The contracting authority tried to challenge the FAS decision issued in response to our complaint, but lost in arbitration court. We have prepared another appeal. the long-suffering procurement by Russia’s Ministry of Regional Development for measures aimed at creating the first phase of the federal state information system for territorial planning. I have written about it many times. The FAS of Russia issued several decisions and two orders in response to our complaints, but the contracting authority ignored them. We filed a crime report with the Investigative Committee. The violations show signs of two criminal offenses at once: Article 178 of the Russian Criminal Code, “Prevention, restriction, or elimination of competition,” and Article 293, “Negligence.” In addition to continuing to push for a criminal case to be opened, we will keep working on expert evaluation of the work performed by the contractor. By the way, an excellent example of how a contracting authority challenges an FAS ruling in court after one of our complaints is the story of the road interchange in Yekaterinburg. On December 23, 2011, a hearing was held at the Moscow Arbitration Court. The court found our arguments about substantial restriction of competition and the removal of the procurement from the list of current tenders on the official website to be well-founded and lawful, and upheld them. The contracting authority will be required to make changes and pay an administrative fine for the violations. As for canceled and re-announced tenders:
The number of canceled tenders amounts to 35% of the total number of tenders in which our complaints were found to be substantiated. Less than 40% of those were later re-announced. At the same time, in more than 90% of cases, the documentation for the re-announced tenders no longer contained the violations from the original tenders that had been eliminated after our complaints. In addition, the project prepared a whole series of filings to oversight bodies other than the antimonopoly service, as well as to the Investigative Committee and the Prosecutor’s Office of the Russian Federation. In particular, we prepared appeals concerning procurements by the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Chechnya, whose activities are supposed to be audited by the Federal Service for Financial and Budgetary Supervision this year, and the “construction” of houses that were already built in Leningrad Region.
. So far, not a single criminal case has been opened on the basis of our filings. Unfortunately, that is the reality. Behind every case RosPil deals with there is corruption and abuse; we do everything we can and provide the authorities with all the materials. But we are not the prosecutor’s office or the Investigative Committee—we cannot open cases or arrest crooks ourselves. Yes, RosPil operates in a system where corrupt officials themselves decide whether other corrupt officials should be prosecuted. We interfere with theft and create obstacles, but we cannot prevent it outright. Political decisions are needed here. 2. Participation in legislative work. From the very beginning, we took an active part in the discussion around the law regulating state and municipal procurement. We made our position clear from the start: we are not on the side of the FAS or the Ministry of Economic Development—we are on the side of a sensible law. It is obvious that Federal Law No. 94 needs serious reform. But it is equally obvious that completely replacing it with a highly vague system of rules granting unlimited powers to contracting authorities is unacceptable. It is hard to overstate the importance of what exactly this law will look like—trillions in budget funds are at stake. That is why we not only took part in the debate, but also proposed very specific amendments that, in our view, should be included in the future procurement law. At present, the draft law on the Federal Contract System has been submitted to the State Duma for consideration. It should be noted that this version includes our amendments concerning the rights of public associations, including the right to go to court to defend the rights and lawful interests of an indefinite group of persons, as well as the right of all interested parties to rapidly appeal violations committed during procurement procedures, regardless of whether they submitted bids to participate in those procedures.
In addition, we prepared amendments concerning officials’ purchases of premium-class cars. The media write about this constantly, we run into such procurements all the time, and our activists keep sending us information about them, wondering why an average official needs an armored car costing 8 million rubles. The “Lexus with bubinga wood trim” alone says it all.
. However, as a rule, from the standpoint of Federal Law No. 94, the documentation for such procurements is, so to speak, “clean.” Moreover, officials currently have every legal right to buy such cars. That is why we appealed to deputies asking them to support our amendments, which would restrict the purchase of cars costing more than 2 million rubles. Naturally, everyone supported them except, of course, United Russia. 3. Bringing public attention to problems in state procurement. One of the project’s main achievements, in our view, is that we managed to draw the attention of hundreds of thousands of people to the problems in public procurement. This was especially important in 2011 and the first half of this year—right now, the future of the entire public procurement system is being decided. Alongside the media, we did everything we could to make what had originally been a narrowly specialized topic interesting to a broader audience. Thanks to the project, it became possible, in a sense, to formalize people’s civic engagement. For example, a significant number of our activists now monitor tender information on a regular basis and send us details about “questionable” procurements; experts help us review such tenders; others have simply started, following our example, to file complaints with antimonopoly authorities, and so on. In other words, thanks to RosPil, anyone can, so to speak, convert their civic activism into something concrete. Through our project, a person really can influence how budget funds are spent. The more such people there are, the more likely serious positive changes become in a system that, to put it mildly, is far from ideal at the moment. We would like, on behalf of the project, to express our gratitude to everyone who transferred funds to our account, who spent their personal time searching for information about tenders and sending it to us, who provided expert assistance, who made sure we didn’t steal anything as part of the project’s oversight group, and finally, to everyone who simply sent us letters of support and offered their help. Thank you so much! Without you, none of this would have existed! We hope for continued fruitful cooperation. Special thanks to our overseers: d**rugoi plushev olegmakarenko.ru dolboeb ** As for our plans, first, the project will expand. New lawyers will join the work. We are currently thinking about developing regional structures that will operate on the RosPil model. A substantial number of people are ready to help us with this. As a pilot, a project has already begun operating in the Ural Federal District—RosPil-Ural Federal District. It is being run by Yekaterina Petrova, who has spent years fighting crooks in Yekaterinburg. Yekaterina studies at the Ural State Law Academy. She completed training in the program “Placement of State and Municipal Orders. Changes and Practice of Applying Legislation. Multi-level Procurement Management System.” Among other things, she investigated collusion at road construction auctions in Sverdlovsk Region. She also provided legal support for public investigations in the region. We have created an email address, analogous to the main project’s email, where people can report suspicious tenders and legal violations in the Ural District: rospil.ural@gmail.com There have already been some early successes. After review of the complaint prepared by Katya, the procurement of a TOYOTA LAND CRUISER 200 for a district administration in Yugra was canceled. Second, we will continue our legislative work. It appears that the law on the Federal Contract System will be adopted in the coming months. We will continue to defend our amendments. Third, we plan to continue our “special investigations.” These concern a particular cycle of procurements, the activities of a specific agency, officials, and so on. Examples of such investigations include MVD procurements in Chechnya, Yurevich’s security detail, and Moscow paving tiles. In the near future, we will publish results on other similar cases. Finally, we are transferring the RosPil project into that very Anti-Corruption Foundation. All project staff have been working for the Foundation under employment contracts since February of this year. Following the results of the year’s work, staff salaries have been increased and now amount to 70,000 rubles. Taxes and insurance contributions are paid on behalf of the Foundation. To pay salaries for February through April, 1,446,096 rubles and 90 kopecks were withdrawn from the Yandex.Money account (including system fees). Accordingly, 1,402,714 rubles were credited to RosPil’s subaccount within the Foundation. It should also be noted separately that the bank fee for servicing RosPil’s subaccount within the Foundation was paid out of the Foundation’s own funds until February 2012, and money raised through Yandex.Money was not spent on it. This, like all expenses, can be seen in our reports: Movement of funds in RosPil’s subaccount within the Foundation in February–March Movement of funds in RosPil’s subaccount in April. We are currently carrying out technical work on the website so that all transactions in RosPil’s subaccount within the Foundation can be published monthly in the relevant section. Thus, for the period from May 10, 2011 (the start of withdrawals from the account) to April 19, 2012, 4,882,278 rubles and 84 kopecks were withdrawn from RosPil’s Yandex.Money account. On May 25, 2012, funds in the amount of 542,970 rubles and 10 kopecks were withdrawn (including system fees). They have already been credited to RosPil’s subaccount within the Foundation. A report on the movement of funds in RosPil’s subaccount for May will be published shortly. If you are still ready to help us, funds should now be transferred to RosPil’s subaccount in the non-profit organization “Anti-Corruption Foundation.”** We have prepared a special guide for individuals.
Receipt for donations to the project Recipient name: Non-profit organization “Anti-Corruption Foundation” Recipient taxpayer ID: 7709471429 Recipient account number: 40703810702710000003 Bank name: ALFA-BANK OJSC, BIC: 044525593 Correspondent account number: 30101810200000000593 Payment purpose: donation to the RosPil project. As for transfers from legal entities, a contract will need to be concluded in those cases (we will write about this in more detail). The previous donation method—Yandex.Money—is still available and works perfectly well. Important: within the Foundation, RosPil is kept in a subaccount and is fully autonomous. RosPil’s money still goes only toward staff salaries, payroll taxes, and the server. If you want to fund RosPil but want nothing to do with the Foundation’s other projects, rest assured: your money will not go to anything else. PS I should say that this is the first post in my LiveJournal that was written mostly not by me. It was Kostya Kalmykov, RosPil’s coordinator—I would have gone crazy from all these numbers and never written something like this. Speaking personally, I thank everyone who helped us, criticized us, donated money to us, and monitored those donations. RosPil has taken the very idea of public and civic oversight to a fundamentally different level and has implemented new mechanisms for organizing that oversight. It has scandal, painstaking work, nasty attacks, “constructive proposals,” PR, and court cases with formal complaints. I think that’s pretty cool. I congratulate RosPil—Kostya Kalmykov, Lyuba Sobol, Pasha Senko, Andrei Mishchenkov, Kostya Terekhov, Yana Vlasenko, and Katya Petrova—on its anniversary, and I wish them (and all of us) continued success in the fight against the crooks who are stealing our money.