Ha ha ha. What a wonderful story from The New Times.
The law requiring elected officials to disclose property owned not only by themselves but also by their spouses and minor children was signed by then-President Dmitry Medvedev in 2008. By that time, Irina Yarovaya’s daughter was already an adult, so there was no need to include her in the declaration. On January 1, 2013, the law “On Monitoring Whether the Expenses of Persons Holding Public Office and Other Persons Correspond to Their Income” came into force; it requires disclosure of spouses’ and minor children’s expenses if the amount of a transaction exceeds the family’s total income for three years. But the apartment in “Tverskaya Plaza” had been purchased almost eight years earlier, so the deal does not fall under that law either. In the 2006–2007 owner voting ballots for “Tverskaya Plaza,” the deputy’s surname appears consistently. Another question is this: where did the family of a Kamchatka deputy get the money in 2006 to buy an apartment worth 36 million rubles? Perhaps her husband, businessman Viktor Alekseenko, had that kind of money. In 2002, he ran for the Council of People’s Deputies of Kamchatka Oblast, and in the official candidate information still preserved online he is listed as the general director of OAO Kamakfes. According to the SPARK-Interfax database, that company was liquidated in 2004, but a person with the same full name is still listed as a co-owner of several other enterprises in Kamchatka Oblast: OOO Tumgutum-Rybozavod, OOO Privoz, OOO Rybak, and finally OOO Kamakfes-Fruits. None of Irina Yarovaya’s declarations lists such assets for her husband. And his income is quite modest: in 2011, for example, he earned only 419,452 rubles. Yarovaya herself receives an ordinary deputy’s salary—2.45 million rubles a year. “Unfortunately, we do not have strict rules for filling out deputies’ declarations,” says Ivan Ninenko, deputy director of Transparency International Russia’s Center for Anti-Corruption Research and Initiatives. “On the one hand, Irina Yarovaya could have listed this apartment in the section for property in use. On the other hand, this point can be worked around. The issue of publishing spouses’ names in declarations is also absolutely relevant for senior officials, because their private lives are in the public sphere.” In Ninenko’s view, in the West a case analogous to Irina Yarovaya’s apartment story could вполне have become grounds for an investigation: “Or at the very least, a matter of ethical conflict. In the West, officials of this level usually disclose even the property of their adult children. Clearly, we also need to raise transparency requirements for top public officials.” But the fact remains: State Duma deputy from the United Russia faction, and head of the Committee on Security and Anti-Corruption, Irina Yarovaya lives in her daughter’s apartment, which today, according to the consulting company Welhome, is worth about $2,898,000 (88.6 million rubles). Read the full article: http://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/63814 Magnificent. Yarovaya is an astonishing woman in general. I remember her well from Yabloko (a liberal Russian political party), when she was being elected Yavlinsky’s deputy—she practically shrieked from the congress podium about what a scoundrel Putin was and what a disgusting thief. And United Russia was nothing less than the spawn of evil. She was quite happy to receive money from Khodorkovsky and head the Kamchatka branch of Open Russia. And then, the classic move: In 2007, she left Yabloko and joined the United Russia party. According to G. Mikhaleva, executive secretary of Yabloko’s Political Committee, her departure was connected with her desire to move from Kamchatka to Moscow and obtain a seat in the State Duma, something G. Yavlinsky could not guarantee her. Yabloko chairman S. Mitrokhin explained Yarovaya’s move to United Russia in much the same way: “she asked to be transferred to Moscow and given an apartment and a car. We, of course, had no such resources. But United Russia did.”* So that’s where the apartment turned up. “Tverskaya Plaza.” Not bad. Update. Yarovaya herself has now commented: Apparently, “we tried in vain.” “I* can only sincerely sympathize with my ill-wishers, who knowingly and dishonestly tried to discredit me. They tried in vain. This is nothing more than a dirty insinuation,” Yarovaya said, adding that she in**tends to continue maintaining a tough and principled position. One of the most corrupt and unprincipled deputies in the State Duma says she will continue to maintain a principled position. She really is a model United Russia member.