Alexei Chumakov on the trends and consequences of imposing secrecy on information

Special for the Yabloko web-site, 16.11.2021

Photo: Sergei Shoigu, Russian Defence Minister / Photo from Kremlin.ru

The protagonists of the animated film The Secret Life of Pets – Chloe the cat, Max the terrier and Gijit the Spitz – face different adventures. Their people do not even know how many interesting things happen in the life of pets. In Russia Russian citizens are in their place, as they have been forbidden to learn how the law enforcement agencies spend taxpayers’ money.

On 16 November, the Ministry of Defence published a draft order on the criteria for official secrets, and there are more than 800 of them. The logic of the Ministry is simple: everything that can be recorded as a state secret should be classified, and the rest will be classified as an official secret. Earlier, Prime Minister Mishustin has already classified the purchases of the Russian Guard, the Federal Guards Service (FSO), the Ministry of Defence, the Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Foreign Intelligence Service.

Let us recollect, what are Shoigu’s subordinates actually trying to hide? Maybe the purchase of Christmas trees worth 3 million roubles per a tree, which we learned about back in 2017? RBC released then our investigation with the headline “The Ministry of Defence sweetened the fir twigs deal”. The PR staff of [Defence Minister] Sergei Shoigu got very much offended, because it is so important for Sergei Shoigu to appear unsullied by corruption. Or we can recollect the case of rotten potatoes in the Viktor Zolotov’s [the Russian Guard] department. 19 tons of potatoes got rotten when the Russian Guard ordered food from an old acquaintance of Zolotov, businessman Vaninsky.

Each such case is a stain on the official’s reputation. But they didn’t find anything better than to hide it all under an ever-widening carpet of corruption – to keep it secret and not to let the investigators go.

In 2019, a large European study was published on the role of transparency in reducing corruption in procurement (Bauhr et al., 2019). Researchers analysed over 3.5 million purchases of the European Union countries from 2006 to 2015.

It was proven: transparency reduces corruption risks in procurement. One additional item of information reduces the number of purchases with one participant by 0.5-1.2%.

This does not seem much, but with the aggregate cost of procurement totaling billions of roubles, the savings or, on the contrary, the budget losses are colossal. Thus, non-transparency not only reduces opportunities for civil control, but also affects competition and the quality of services.

Total non-transparency gives rise to total inefficiency. The Ministry of Defence, going deep into the swamp of opacity, is digging a pit for itself. The law enforcement agencies, in the absence of civil control and competition, will continue buying rotten potatoes and Christmas trees at inflated prices.

References:

Bauhr, M., Czibik, Á., Fine Licht, J. and Fazekas, M., 2019. Lights on the shadows of public procurement: Transparency as an antidote to corruption. Governance, 33(3), pp.495-523.

 ALEXEI CHUMAKOV

is Deputy Director of

Anti-Corruption Policy Centre of the

Yabloko party