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City Gov. Vladimir Yakovlev has offered to draft a bill
ensuring governors' immunity from prosecution for alleged
crimes committed in office when a governor's term of
service ends.
"If a high ranking official defends the legality and
interests of his region, it is inevitable that he will have
enemies who would like to settle old scores - with great
pleasure - after a governor leaves office," Vladimir
Yakovlev said in an Interfax interview Friday.
"If governors were sure that they won't be left on the
street and unemployed, there wouldn't be such negativity
surrounding the issue."
Yakovlev's remarks followed the Federation Council's
Wednesday approval of a law that diminishes former
president Boris Yeltsin's immunity from criminal prosecution for
misdeeds
committed in office. The law was a very watered down version of
the
virtually
untouchable status given Yeltsin and members of his family by
Vladimir
Putin.
Alexander Afanasiyev, the governor's spokesman, was quick to
point out
in a
telephone interview Monday that Yakovlev did not mean any one
governor
in
particular when making his statements, but that the subject "just
came
up while he
was having a cup of tea with journalists from Interfax."
Afanasiyev added that "the governor has no enemies."
Yakovlev himself has not fallen under the magnifying glass of
police or
prosecutors
during his tenure in office, though his wife and many of his
high-ranking City Hall
officials have been under investigation.
Last April, a month before the 2000 gubernatorial elections,
representatives of the
Economic Crime Department of the Federal Interior Ministry searched
the
offices of
a charity fund, which is run on the patronage of Irina Yakovleva,
Gov.
Yakovlev's
wife.
Officials said they suspected that city budget money may have
been
embezzled
through the office's accounts, and police insisted that the searches
were not
politically motivated. The searches turned up nothing and no wrongdoing
was
discovered.
Alexander Shishlov, Yabloko State Duma lawmaker, said that Yakovlev's
preoccupation with the immunity question could jinx him in the
end.
"As the practice shows, the presence of immunity indicates
that
'negativity' tends to
appear around some governors," Shishlov said in a telephone
interview
Monday.
Leonid Kesselman, a political analyst for the Sociological Department
of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, said that Yakovlev had made a mistake
in
raising
the question of governors' immunity.
"If I was a governor, I wouldn't do that. If a person knows
that he
hasn't
committed any sins, why should he be worried about it?" Kesselman
said
in a
telephone interview Monday.
"And again, besides immunity, there is a Swiss Prosecutor's
Office, who
can find
just about anyone they need," Kesselman joked.
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