Yesterday, as you know, the Moscow City Election Commission forbade me from using the words "abuse" and "theft," demanding that I replace them with "questions of economic activity". All right, all right. Since City Hall is so afraid of plain language, I will be the most polite and cultured candidate. And I will also ask very polite questions of the civil servant and acting Mayor of Moscow, Sobyanin. Perhaps it is precisely my use of such improper words as "theft," "stole," and "skimmed off" that has led candidate Sobyanin to ignore for so long my previous questions "about economic activity involving paving tiles," "about economic activity involving landscaping," and "about the economic activity of Uzbek janitors removing banners from a balcony." This question is very polite and very well-founded. And it is highly appropriate, given the biography of civil servant Sobyanin, which tells us that civil servant Sobyanin has been in government service since as far back as 1984, when he began working for the city committee of the Komsomol (the Soviet Communist youth organization). In accordance with Russian election law, the Moscow City Election Commission published information on the income and property of Moscow mayoral candidate Sergei Sobyanin, his wife, and his minor daughter for 2012. What immediately stands out in these disclosures is an apartment in Moscow measuring 3**08.1 **sq. m. (308.1 square meters), **owned outright by **the daughter of civil servant Sobyanin — Olga Sergeyevna, born in 1997. Working with open databases allows us to easily establish that this apartment is located at: Moscow, Rochdelskaya Street, Building 12, Structure 1 (we also know the apartment number). This residential property has been owned by O.S. Sobyanina since August 2010.
Full extract from the Unified State Register of Property Rights. It should be noted that this is a super-elite building in the very center of Moscow, literally next to the White House (the Russian government building).
In the same building, a 200.2 sq. m. (200.2 square meter) apartment is for sale for 103.8 million rubles ($3.4 million), which works out to $17,000 per square meter. Accordingly,** the 308 sq. m. apartment owned by civil servant Sobyanin’s minor daughter is worth $5.27 million, or 173 million rubles. ** Naturally, elections place a special responsibility on candidates, who must demonstrate maximum transparency in everything related to their income and property. And we very much hope that Sergei Semyonovich Sobyanin will be able to explain to Moscow voters how his minor daughter came to own a huge luxury apartment in a prestigious district of Moscow, just steps away from the Government House, with a market value of no less than 5 million U.S. dollars. If he bought the apartment, then with what income? Sergei Sobyanin first declared his income in 2000, when he was a candidate for governor of Tyumen Region. His annual income for 1999 amounted to 299** thousand rubles, of** which 273.9 thousand rubles came from payments by the Duma of the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug. In 2003, together with his United Russia colleagues, he published an income declaration according to which he earned 1.6 million rubles in 2002. For 2008, his income was 3,472,200 rubles; his wife’s income was 21,800. For 2009 — 3,219,776 and 18,586 rubles respectively. For 2010 — 4,760,000 and 19,300 rubles. We do not know Sergei Semyonovich’s income for 2003–2007, nor that of his wife — but even if we assume that their combined income was no less than in 2008, the max**imum total could hardly have exceeded 27 million rubles by 2010. And that is **only if they saved every kopek and neither ate nor drank. Thus, the value of the apartment owned by civil servant Sobyanin is roughly six times greater than his possible income over the last 10 years. According to media reports, this luxury building previously belonged to the Property Management Department of the President of the Russian Federation. OK, perhaps civil servant Sobyanin, having arrived in Moscow from Tyumen, was granted official housing, which he later privatized by some clever means. Then we should recall that there are certain standards for allocating living space to those in need. I do not think it is more than 20 square meters per family member. Civil servant Sobyanin must have quite a large family if he was allocated — and allowed to privatize — a 308-square-meter apartment. An amusing fact: On the ground floor there is a 1,661.1 sq. m. space leased by LLC "Company "Golden Age," which is owned by Igor Yuryevich Chaika, the son of Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika. According to the legal entities register, its main line of business is "Provision of services by hairdressing and beauty salons." With a little digging, one can find that in this building there is a beauty salon called “Impression.” It is unlikely we will ever learn whether civil servant Olga Sergeyevna Sobyanina ever visited the beauty salon owned by the son of civil servant Igor Yuryevich Chaika. Oh well. What is much more interesting, however, is how minor children of civil servants come to own apartments like this. I very much await candidate Sobyanin’s response to this very polite question. I urge all media representatives to ask it as well; I am sure Muscovites would be interested to hear the answer. Nevertheless, since civil servant Sobyanin ignored my previous questions, I am sending a request to the prosecutor’s office asking it to verify the legality of the apartment’s purchase, or of its receipt and subsequent privatization. After all, five million dollars is no joke. An especially large amount. PS I would be grateful for the widest possible dissemination of this information. The people should know about the hard lot of our "civil servants."