They learned to hide their property, but the state did not “learn” to look for it
The palace of the former head of the Stavropol traffic police in the territory of Stavropol, Alexei Safonov, whose investigation he suspects of a large bribe that was heard around the world, is recorded on his partner. Therefore, there was no palace in the statement of income and property that Mr. Safonov, as an official of relatively high rank each year, submitted. The question arises: why are all these statements at all, if they do not give an idea of the level of well-being of officials, police officers and MPs, which is more or less close to reality?
We talked about this with the expert in the fight against corruption, Professor of the Free University Elena PANFILOVA.
Photo: Alexey Merinov
Anti-corruption legislation requires senior officials, officials and police officers, starting with certain functions, to report annually detailed information on cash receipts, their sources, securities, stakes and shares in the share capital of various companies and banks, real estate (and which is owned and which is rented or free to use), as well as vehicles. Similar information should be provided about your spouses and minor children. Only extremely generalized data are available to the general public: we see only the total amount of cash income for a given year, without listing their sources, only the area of land, house or apartment and country of their location are reported real estate and we know nothing about shares and accounts.
– It makes sense and it won't go away from all these stories. However, the declaration consists of three elements: submission of the declaration to the control authorities, publication of the declaration and verification of the declaration. In the system we have developed since 2008-2009, the first and second elements work: statements are made, they are made public. But the third element, quality control, obviously didn't work. And it's not surprising, because all this time we haven't heard anything about real experts appearing in large numbers in government agencies who know what to look for and how to check these statements. And I don't think it worked either, partly because there is no political will to reveal anything en masse.
Of course, in many other countries, citizens who are obliged to make a declaration try to cheat, remove, hide, someone “forgets” something. Even in Russia, they have quite cheerfully learned to rewrite property to relatives, adult children, wives and girlfriends of common law … But here we return to the first thesis: in such a desire to hide property there is nothing new from the declaration, but if there is desire and ability seek and control everything possible. And recent stories show that as soon as they want, they'll find her right away.
– Even in these emulated data, you can find a lot, as journalistic investigations show. The fact that a substantial part of the information that should have been opened and published has become closed with the adoption of anti-corruption legislation is absolutely true … As far as world experience is concerned, everything is different in different countries. In some places, the data are published in approximately the same volume as in Russia, but on request, any voter can obtain more detailed information about their representative. For example, in Germany. And such a mechanism could work for us if we were interested. But on the one hand, we have the UN Convention against Corruption, which we have signed and ratified and which needs to be implemented, and on the other hand, we have a desire to implement it so that no one knows anything.
– As soon as the story with the declaration of the couple appeared, very quickly many stopped trusting even adult children and began to divorce, to live in civil marriage. And not only MPs – there are also plenty of them among officials. In general, however, there are standards in international law that allow for the inspection of divorced spouses when reviewing the declaration, provided that the period since the divorce does not exceed approximately one year, approximately three years. Law enforcement officers around the world are well aware of this divorce trick. There is an international organization FATF (Group for the Development of Anti-Money Laundering Financial Measures, Develops Global Standards for the Fight against Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing – “MC”) and, according to its recommendations, controls money laundering that may be related to publicly divorced spouses.
– Therefore, our Rosfinmonitoring should also theoretically consider divorced spouses as subjects of verification. In this case, it is not so much about corruption as about money laundering, but as you know, corruption and money laundering go hand in hand …