Press Release, 27.09.2021

Photo: Vera Morozova / Photo by Vera Morozova

The Krasnogvardeisky District Court of St. Petersburg satisfied Vera Morozova’s claim against the Malaya Okhta municipality. Morozova challenged the Municipal Council’s decision to deprive her of her powers as a municipal deputy from Yabloko. In November 2020, Morozovs was unlawfully deprived of her deputy’s mandate due to a formal claim to her income declaration. This initiative came from the Governor.

The violation for which Morozova was deprived of her mandate was that the she did not indicate her husband’s zero account in her declaration. The commission under the Committee for Territorial Development drew attention to this shortcoming, and Alexander Beglov, Governor of St. Petersburg, sent to the Municipal Council a request to take action, since this violation “could not be considered insignificant”. Also in one of the graphs Morozova indicated data from the “ending balance” on her account at Alfa-Bank. The Committee for Territorial Development Commission compared this line with a completely different line – the “beginning balance”.

When making a decision, the Municipal Council relied solely on a letter from the Governor. The pro-government deputies did not study the discovered “violations”.

Today the district court considered Vera Morozova’s declaration of income and requested documents from the Governor’s Administration on its verification. After that, the court sided with the Yabloko deputy and ruled to immediately restore her deputy powers.

It should be noted that another Yabloko municipal deputy, Anna Karulicheva, was deprived of her mandate of a municipal deputy of the Narva District under a similar scheme. The Governor also initiated the process. However, in this case, the Yabloko deputy was not even allowed to properly study the information on the discovered “errors”: only one day was given to her for studying of the document and filing an appeal, whereas they refused to send the document by e-mail.