Press Release, 25.11.2020

Photo: Anna Karulicheva, municipal deputy from Yabloko, St.Peterburg

Yekaterina Kuznetsova, Chair the St.Petersburg branch of Yabloko, issued a statement demanding from Governor Alexander Beglov to stop the attempts to deprive Yabloko municipal deputy Anna Karulicheva of her mandate in the Narvsky District Municipality.

The Governor demanded to deprive Yabloko deputy of the mandate on the pretext of a “failure by the deputy … to implement the duties established by the Federal Law “On Combating Corruption” in the form of submitting “inaccurate and / or incomplete information on income for 2019”. However, the Governor failed to indicate which information exactly was “inaccurate and / or incomplete”.

“Anna is the only (!) oppositional deputy on the council of ten people. For the second year she has been fighting with all her might for the interests of residents. And has been bullied on a regular basis. The reason behind of for what has been happening is the desire to get rid of the dissenting deputy,” Yabloko statement runs.

“We demand to end the persecution of deputy Anna Karulicheva and give up the attempts to deprive her of her mandate,” Yekaterina Kuznetsova, Chair of the St.Petersburg branch of Yabloko writes.

Shortly after issuing the statement, Yabloko received information that there emerged a similar motion to deprive two more dissenting municipal deputies of their mandates: Vera Morozova, deputy of the Malaya Okhta municipal council from the Yabloko party, and Svetlana Utkina, deputy in the Finlyandsky  municipal council, who had won the elections as an independent candidate.

“We state that our demand also applies to the situation with Vera and Svetlana. And it will apply to every opposition deputy, whom they will try to deprive of his/her mandate,” Yekaterina Kuznetsova notes.