United Russia doubts financing of Navalny’s campaign is legal

The financing scheme, which a Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny has been using for his election campaign, violates directly the election legislation, Deputy Head of United Russia’s Central Executive Committee Konstantin Mazurevsky told Itar-Tass on Saturday. He says, the election legislation contains a clear explanation of a voluntary donation, which is a gratuitous transfer by a Russian citizen of own monetary assets to a special election account of a candidate /paragraph 14, article 2 of the federal law” On Basic Guarantees of Election Rights and the Right to Participate in a Referendum for Citizens of the Russian Federation”/. “Thus, the law bans the so-called two-stage schemes of making payments to election accounts, where monetary funds at first come from unidentified third parties to persons, clear for the candidate, and those persons later on in their own names transfer the monies, as their own ones - though it is not their money, to the candidate’s election account,” Mazurevsky said. He added that the judicial practice had confirmed donations of the kind were illegal. “The situation becomes that with use of this system of financing, electors not only know the true sponsors of the candidate, but it is a direct violation of the election legislation,” he said. “There is a major difference between Navalny’s top-secret “student” account in the US and the special election account of a Moscow mayoral candidate: all operations with the latter must be most transparent, clear and public.” Earlier, LDPR’s leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky promised to demand an investigation from Russia’s Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika into origins of the money transferred online to Moscow’s mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny. Zhirinovsky said the blogger’s election account had 20 million roubles, and “the money arrives every ten minutes online via Yandex in parts of 10-15 thousand roubles. “We cannot see who is transferring money to him - Washington or Chukotka,” Zhirinovsky said. Navalny, in his turn, promised to publish all the data on donations for his election campaign. “We have already collected about 30 million roubles,” he wrote in his blog and promised to report on exact sums and timing of the transfers.