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Vladimir Kovalyev

Governor Immunity Sought by Yakovlev

St Peterburg Times № 642, Tuesday, February 06, 2001

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.

St Peterburg Times № 640, Tuesday, January 30, 2001