The project of the Popular Front "For Fair Purchases" has a new leader. ONF activists from Buryatia lied to Vladimir Putin? life under lock and key

ONF challenges organized theft in public procurement

The All-Russian Popular Front held an "Action Forum", at which the project "For Fair Procurement" was named one of the main achievements. Project curator Anastasia Mutalenko tells how the mechanism for monitoring the effectiveness of government spending works, what questions the “front-line soldiers” have for ex-Minister Ulyukaev and what she disagrees with Alexei Kudrin.

Anastasia Alexandrovna, your project “For Fair Purchasing” has saved the state treasury billions of rubles. How was it done?

Our work is based on the selfless activity of 11,000 activists in the regions. Everything is quite simple: if you are a caring person and see, for example, that the construction of, say, a camp site is a screen for theft, then you have a direct path to us. When we receive relevant information, we involve experts and form an initiative - a set of documents on probable theft or other abuses, which we send to both the authorities and law enforcement agencies. Among the latest results: for example, it was possible to prevent the purchase of luxury goods and services worth 20 billion rubles. These are chic corporate parties, luxury foreign cars for local authorities and the like. By the way, on our initiatives, it was decided to limit the cost of personal cars for regional leaders to one and a half million rubles, and two and a half - for federal officials. Lexus and BMW should no longer be in the garages of administrations.

But the ONF social organization, there are not so many opportunities to influence dubious decisions on budget spending ...

Yes it is. However, our leader is the President of Russia, and this changes a lot, officials react quite effectively to our recommendations, because information about violations and abuses can reach the President, and he will declare, so to speak, a check to this or that leader, or even checkmate. Of course, we inform law enforcement, but there very often such cases and investigations get stuck, especially in the regions.

Perhaps the reason is that there are no legal novelties in the legislation that provide for, say, liability for the failure of planned indicators and inefficient spending of budget funds?

There is such a problem: legally it is possible to punish only for the misuse of funds, but for the fact that, for example, billions of budget rubles are buried in the ground, it is difficult or impossible to punish. Ulyukaev is charged with a bribe of $2 million, and no one is responsible for the fact that when he was his minister, ill-considered investment decisions were made that led to losses for the budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. And behind such actions, as experience shows, very often there are organized large-scale theft. The fight against corruption should be systemic, like corruption itself, it would be good to support the civil position and actions of our activists by law.

But there are quite specific articles of the criminal code that punish negligence, abuse of authority, commercial bribery...

Yes there is. But our practice shows that law enforcement agencies are not always eager to apply these articles, probably due to the fact that they allow double interpretations in our cases: it is possible to impute a criminal violation, or it is possible to impute a civil arbitration violation. Let me give you an example: in the Republic of Altai, they received a billion state rubles as part of the development of the tourism cluster of the Special Economic Zone. They planned to dig and equip an artificial lake, and set up an amusement park around it, and found a private investor for three billion rubles. The result - with five hundred million budget rubles, the general contractor, I would venture to suggest, “thanked” the lobbyists who helped to get a contract, and built a kind of semi-finished product for the remaining half a billion, there was not enough money for a full-fledged, in accordance with the technology, construction. Somehow they depicted the appearance of a completed object.

The grand opening, they fill the lake with water in the presence of leaders and before their eyes this water goes into the soil, there was not enough money for a special waterproofing film!

It is clear that the private investor immediately ran away, abandoning his plans. So this semi-finished product stands as a monument to unprofessionalism and corruption. The local prosecutor's office, where we applied with the relevant request and documents, refused to initiate a criminal case. The motive is curious - this is not our competence, the money is allocated from federal budget, let Moscow understand. And there are enough similar stories with tourist clusters: in Blagoveshchensk they built an embankment that leads nowhere, in Buryatia they also built an embankment, simultaneously solving local problems with water intake at the expense of federal money, and so on… tourist sites, spend money on their own, perhaps quite justified and necessary goals. And it is very difficult to stop such funding, there are too many interested people in Moscow and locally. Only the intervention of President Putin, for example, made it possible to freeze the financing of the Special Economic Zones for three years, transferring financial care for facilities already built at the expense of the federal budget to the regional authorities.

Probably, someone will reproach me for such an analogy, but I will say that in the history of our country there was a set of articles "for sabotage", it very accurately described the composition of such crimes, including those described by you ...

Yes, there is a topic to discuss both in the Federal Assembly and our respected legal academicians. And not to be limited to the regions, but also to analyze the actions of many state-owned companies. Why, for example, in case of significant failures in financial and economic activities in Gazprom, payments to members of the management board are significantly increased, to fantastic amounts - a billion or more rubles a year for one such member? We cannot work directly with state-owned companies, although we are trying to understand their activities through the Government and deputies cooperating with the ONF. And of course, we take into account our ability to inform the president directly. Let me give you one more example: it is no secret that construction is a very corruption-intensive industry. They steal there, for example, like this: they bury a cheap pipe in a trench, and in the reports they write that they used an expensive one. Today there is a great way to check what was actually put there: take a picture of all the stages of work and attach it to financial documents. We proposed to make it a mandatory norm, but were refused. Or rather, not a refusal, but the wording in the relevant law to make such an order optional, but recommendatory. It is clear that such recommendations will not be heeded.

- Yes, even the commissioner of Catania failed to defeat the construction "mafia" ...

Because he acted alone. If I were our activist, I would definitely win.

Shortly before your "Forum of Action" there were meetings of another Forum, the All-Russian Civil Forum, headed by Alexei Kudrin, a well-known Russian economist. The goals there were also declared social: the need to invest in "human capital", to deal with the environment, and so on. But there were also apocalyptic conclusions: the country is going through the deepest systemic crisis, the Government is not able to manage the economy...

Some things we can agree on, times are tough. But you can lie on the couch and fight over the Internet according to the principle everything is bad and “it's time to bring down”, or you can try to do something, turn the tide. We in the ONF prefer to act, no one will do anything for us. There are results, 227 billion rubles only for the project that I supervise have been saved for the budget, but more can be done to ensure the effective spending of trillions of rubles, as long as government officials are not able to minimize corruption, bring lovers of pomp at the state expense into an adequate state , check how effective the recommendations for overcoming economic crisis numerous research universities and centers receiving abundant funding from the budget and so on. But without broad, nationwide, pardon the pathos, support, this will not be possible.

The project manager of the ONF “For Fair Purchases”, relying, most likely, on the information of her colleagues from Buryatia, in one word, not into the void, but to the head of state, put an end to all Tunkinsky tourism.

Anastasia Mutalenko

Anastasia Mutalenko, head of the project "For fair purchases" of the ONF: They promised balneological clinics, new hotels, restaurants, shopping and entertainment centers. To do this, they mastered 230 million rubles, made a road, treatment facilities, but there are no promised business plans, infrastructure facilities there.

Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation: There are always doubts about whether they really wanted to create some kind of new tourism cluster or just wanted to give some contractors close to their hearts a certain job.

To dispel doubts, albeit with a delay of five time zones, but the local Ministry of Economy tried.

230 million federal rubles were spent on the construction of 10 kilometers of roads and a water intake facility, there was no longer enough money for treatment.

Ekaterina Mukhina, Deputy Chairman of the Tourism Committee of the Ministry of Economy of Buryatia: The most offensive thing is that it was said that real investors do not exist.

Ekaterina Mukhina

Guest house for 200 beds in the Tunkinsky district. There were outdoor baths, concrete baths. Today there are full-fledged pavilions.

There are 15 investors working in Tunka, they have attracted 730 million rubles for tourism, which is three extra-budgetary rubles for one federal ruble. Investors are also investing in other tourist clusters.

Alexander Bituev spent his personal 25 million in the Ivolginsky and Kabansky districts.

Alexander Bituev

Alexander Bituev, entrepreneur: A very short tourist season visiting the coast, that is, in fact, it does not exceed 2.5 months. The rest of the time we have to protect the objects that we have created. For such a short season, it is very difficult to justify even the money that we earn in the summer.

Tatyana Dumnova

Tatyana Dumnova, former Minister of Economy of Buryatia: There are restrictions that really hinder the implementation of projects, and the fact that investors did not enter these areas also played a role, because the crisis, such a time, many revised their plans.

In total, there are four tourist clusters in Buryatia. Almost eight billion rubles were spent on their development. Tourist flow increases by 15% annually. Over one million people visited Buryatia last year.

The head of one of the most important and image-building projects for the All-Russian Popular Front (ONF), Anton Guetta, has been removed from his post, an interlocutor close to the movement told Vedomosti, and one of the “front-line soldiers” confirmed it. Another member of the movement is also aware of the change in project leadership. On March 23-25, Moscow is to host the next forum “Government Order for Fair Procurement” in the field of state, municipal and corporate procurement. Representatives of the ONF are going to sum up the results of the implementation of the President's instructions to increase the efficiency of procurement procedures, formulated after Vladimir Putin's meeting with ONF activists on November 27, 2015. This is stated in an address to the forum participants by co-chairman of the ONF central headquarters Alexander Brechalov. The forum was supposed to participate and Guetta. But at the event, Guetta's transfer to another direction may be announced, two interlocutors say.