Press Release, 22.04.2016

The Bureau of the YABLOKO party issued a statement demanding to conduct an investigation into the activities of all of the state officials mentioned in the Panama Papers.

The Bureau noted that in spite of the great importance of the information provided by the Panama Papers, there had been absolutely no legal reaction of the state regarding the state officials meddled in the Panama scandal.

“The Panama Papers clearly demonstrates that corruption in Russia is of systemic nature. It is inseparable from the system governing formed in Russia today,” the statement runs.

As a confirmation the authors of the statement gave an example of a recent speech by Tatyana Golikova, head of the Auditing Chamber, who said that annually Russia had been losing trillions of rubles due to the inefficient use of funds.

According to the YABLOKO Bureau , “the funds allocated by the state to the state corporations projects remain on the companies’ balance sheets, without bringing revenues to the state, the tasks are not fulfilled. In a situation when the social sphere undergoes optimisation, the state corporations remain parasitic on the national budget, eating up the interest from depositing budget funds”.

The Bureau emphasised that the Ministry of Finance and the Auditing Chamber should submit a public report on the amount of subsidies granted to the state corporations, the amount of property contributions by the Russian Federation to the assets of state corporations and the amount of their deposits. Unused funds and interest previously accrued on deposits should be immediately returned to the state budget and allotted to the underfunded areas: education, health care, culture and science. The Bureau demanded that the Public Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee should publicly report on the response measures to the findings of the Auditing Chamber for the past three years, as well as disclose the information on the funds spent on the maintenance of the Investigative Committee.

“An alternative to the existing system is transparency, openness of state for each person, freedom of opinion and alternation of power”, the document concludes.