Our officials are astonishingly inventive—and just as astonishingly brazen. Only recently, RosPil announced a campaign against the use of Latin letters in the names of goods/services procured for state needs, and the Moscow Region BTI (Bureau of Technical Inventory) has now demonstrated that it is quite prepared to decisively give up Latin letters. Just not kickbacks:
http://www.zakupki.gov.ru/pgz/public/action/orders/info/common_info/show?notificationId=5348849 O p e n t e n d e r f o r t h e r i g h t t o c o n c l u d e a c o n t r a c t f o r c o n d u c t i n g t h e m a n d a t o r y a n n u a l a u d i t o f t h e a c c o u n t i n g (f i n a n c i a l) s t a t e m e n t s o f M O B T I, a Moscow Region State Unitary Enterprise, f o r 2 0 1 2 Is it written in Russian? Yes. Can you understand what it says? Yes. Can you find this tender on the state procurement website? No. One of these wonderful people is getting ready to become 1.3 million rubles richer (about $40,000 at the time). Probably not exactly a fortune by the standards of the Moscow Region BTI, and I imagine the earning opportunities there are fantastic, but then again the risk is almost nonexistent—and every little bit helps. A big hello to Andrei Vorobyov, acting governor of the Moscow Region and a United Russia party member, w h o i s r u n n i n g i n t h e S e p t e m b e r e l e c t i o n s a n d w i l l b e t r y i n g t o c o n v i n c e u s t h a t t h e r e i s n o c o r r u p t i o n i n h i s g o v e r n m e n t. We have written to the Moscow Region government, the Investigative Committee, and the Federal Antimonopoly Service (of course). We’ll let you know what the response is. RosPil’s coordinator attended a working group of the Open Government initiative and spoke there about our proposals for combating tricks like this. It seems everyone supported them and even expressed a desire to publicly and demonstratively punish a few villains. We’ll see what comes of it. And of course, we’ll provide the list of villains.