Russian brains leaked through “Dry”

To the 16 previously announced violations – from the registration of the charter to the violation of the law on personal data – was added a “brain drain”

On February 20, the Basmanny Court of Moscow failed to make a decision on the suit of the Moscow Department of the Ministry of Justice on the liquidation of the Russian office of the Jewish agency Sokhnut, which is engaged in the resettlement of citizens to Israel. During the hearing, representatives of the administrative plaintiff caught the defendant in the fact that during repatriation preference is given to Russian highly qualified specialists in various fields.

The court session on Monday, February 20, almost started without representatives of the Ministry of Justice, who were three minutes late for the process. During this time, the lawyers of “Sokhnut” managed to file a petition to postpone the meeting “for reconciliation of calculations”, which concerned the ministry’s claim about the organization’s spending of funds. Lawyers asked to attach a new report for 2021 and postpone the hearing for a period of “at least one month.”

However, the plaintiff’s representatives came to the rescue and attached written explanations on the claim, which their opponents demanded at the last meeting. To study them, the lawyers of the traditional agency asked for a long break. However, Judge Olga Lipkina did not postpone the meeting for a long time, interrupting the hearing for three hours. The wait was extended for six hours due to the fact that the judge left for another trial. After that, the representatives of “Sohnut” once again tried to reschedule the hearing, but failed. Then they asked several questions to their opponents.

The lawyers pointed out that there are three main grounds for the liquidation of a public organization: carrying out activities prohibited by law, conducting it in violation of the constitution, as well as with other repeated and gross violations of the law.

“Do we understand correctly that the plaintiff considers the conduct of the activities of “Sohnut” with repeated and gross violations of the law or other legal acts as the basis for liquidation?” – the lawyer Robert Simonyan, representing the interests of the society, asked the procedural opponents.

In response, representatives of the ministry said that the agency violated both the law and the constitution, namely Article 17, which guarantees the rights and freedoms of man and citizen in the Russian Federation. In accordance with the federal law “On Personal Data”, when processing a citizen’s personal data, the right to privacy, personal and family secrets is guaranteed. However, the organization “created conditions” under which the legitimate rights and interests of citizens are not respected, no one asks their permission.

“These violations have been detected since 2019. They were not some new ones, the organization knew that they needed to bring their activities in line with the law, but they did not do this, ”said Margarita Mezentseva, a representative of the ministry. She spoke about the fines that the heads of the agency’s regional organizations were subjected to.

Mezentseva also said that when applying for repatriation, preference was given to “highly qualified specialists in various fields.” However, she could not provide evidence of this, referring to the fact that this was established by an audit, the documents of which are marked “for official use”.

In turn, representatives of the “Sohnut” claimed that the organization drew conclusions and corrected the violations committed. They insisted that the lawyers of the Ministry of Justice should prove the opposite.

Everyone was already waiting for the hearing to drag on until late, when suddenly the judge first announced a five-minute break, and later generally postponed the hearing until March 30 to prepare the legal position of the parties “in connection with the received written explanations of the Ministry of Justice on the claim”, which she was asked to do at the very beginning of the meeting .

An administrative claim was filed by the Department of the Ministry of Justice for Moscow in the summer of 2022. Since then, the proceedings have been adjourned six times (19 August, 19 September, 19 October and 20 October, 20 December 2022 and 17 February 2023). Representatives of the society asked for time to eliminate violations, in particular, to amend the charter and the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, and the court gave them such time. However, the Ministry of Justice each refused to register the changes or presented new claims to the organization. In mid-February, the agency filed a charter for re-registration for the sixth time.

The court was only able to start considering the case on the merits on 17 February. Part of the claims of the Ministry of Justice to the agency concerned shortcomings in the registration of statutory documents. In particular, Sokhnut did not include the abbreviated name of the organization in English in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities, the address in the Unified State Register of Legal Entities was indicated with an error, the charter did not define the supreme governing body, and a number of clauses of the charter contradicted the law on non-profit organizations. The composition of the founders indicated in the charter did not correspond to the current one. In addition, an unscheduled audit of the organization’s branches in Omsk, Novosibirsk and Saratov, conducted in June 2022, found that their information system did not have “certified means of cryptographic information protection.”

The representative of the Ministry of Justice stated that the organization committed 16 gross violations in 2019-2021, which are “systematic and irremediable”. So, she was fined 13 times for violating the law on personal data of citizens for a total of 735 thousand rubles. According to Margarita Mezentseva, a representative of the Moscow Department of the Ministry, the facts of “repeated collection of personal data of citizens of the Russian Federation and their transfer abroad without their consent” were revealed. Also, she said, the inspectors found violations in the organization’s spending of funds.

Representatives of the society consider the claims made formal and removable, and some of them unfounded. Thus, they reported that the courts in the regions fined two former coordinators of the organization’s regional branches when they left their positions long ago. They announced the elimination of a number of violations, in particular, data protection with the help of a hired company.

“Sohnut” is an international organization based in Israel that deals with repatriation to the country and assistance to repatriates, issues related to Jewish-Zionist education and the global Jewish community.

In July last year, a delegation from Israel came to Moscow to discuss the activities of the Jewish Agency on the territory of the Russian Federation. In addition, the situation around “Sokhnut” became the topic of a telephone conversation between the presidents of Russia and Israel, Vladimir Putin and Yitzhak Herzog. It was also touched upon by Israeli Prime Minister Yair Lapid.