The Commission of the Legislative Assembly of the Ulyanovsk Region for Controlling the Reliability of Information on Income recommended that the powers of non-factional deputy Matvey Volodarsky be terminated for his wife’s shares in a foreign company. According to the parliamentarian himself, we are talking about an individual investment account (IIA) for trading, which was secretly opened by his minor son, who earned 1.7 thousand rubles. Mr. Volodarsky intends to sue the bank that opened the account without parental consent, as well as the Legislative Assembly, if the decision to withdraw the mandate is made.
On May 12, at an extraordinary meeting of the Ulyanovsk Regional Legislative Assembly, a draft resolution on the termination of Matvey Volodarsky’s deputy powers in connection with violations revealed in his income information will be considered. The parliamentary commission for monitoring the reliability of information about the incomes of deputies recommended that this document be submitted to the session and supported on Wednesday.
As Dmitry Grachev, chairman of the commission, explained to Kommersant, the fact of the violation was established by the prosecutor’s office of the Ulyanovsk region.
Deputies, their spouses and minor children are prohibited from having shares in foreign companies and using foreign financial instruments, “while Matvey Volodarsky, when submitting the declaration, himself reflected in the declaration of his wife the presence of shares in a foreign company from the United States and the Netherlands,” Mr. Grachev explained.
“It turned out that on behalf of the wife, an agreement was concluded to open a brokerage account and perform actions to buy and sell shares on her behalf. There were several surgeries in total. At the same time, at the time of the check, the account was not closed,” the head of the commission said, adding that according to the law, this is “definitely incompatible with the status of a deputy” and without alternative entails the deprivation of the mandate.
At the same time, Dmitry Grachev expressed regret that the Legislative Assembly would lose an opposition deputy: “Such people are needed to raise sensitive issues, to show alternative opinions.” Recall that in 2018, Matvey Volodarsky was elected to the regional parliament in a single-mandate constituency from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, but after a while he left the faction, saying that he did not agree with the communists on many issues. In April 2021, the region was headed by a representative of the Communist Party, Aleksey Russkikh, to whom Mr. Volodarsky stood in strong opposition.
Matvey Volodarsky himself, in an interview with Kommersant, said that he did not agree with the decision of the commission: there were shares, but this is “an ordinary game on the stock market”, and it was played by the 16-year-old son of a deputy who was able to secretly open a copy of his mother’s passport via the Internet IIS in BCS bank and conclude a brokerage agreement.
“The kid decided to play, as it were, he deposited 12.8 thousand rubles into the account. and earned by the end of the year 1.7 thousand rubles. I found out about this only at the end of March, when I began to collect information about income. And I did not hide this fact, although my colleagues say that it would be easier to hide it, especially since by December 1 there were no foreign shares there anymore,” Mr. Volodarsky assures.
He added that he later tried to close the account and make changes to the declaration, but to no avail. “I believe that this is a purely political massacre, a political murder without trial or investigation, they want to get rid of me before the governor’s report, which was postponed from April to the end of May. Everything is decided within three days, although we have 90 days according to the regulations to deal with violations,” the deputy said.
He intends to sue the BCS bank, and if he is deprived of his deputy mandate, then with the legislative assembly, “because such a decision has nothing to do with legislation.”
It should be noted that this is not the first time deputies have been deprived of their mandate in the Ulyanovsk region for inaccurate information about income. So, in April 2019, the Legislative Assembly of the region, with the votes of United Russia, deprived Denis Guryanov, a deputy from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who could not provide a certificate of income of his ex-wife, who refused to provide this information because of “hostility” to her ex-husband. In January 2020, then-governor Sergei Morozov demanded that two deputies of the Dimitrovgrad City Duma from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (at that time the majority in the city parliament were communists) be deprived of their mandates, which eventually happened after the intervention of the prosecutor’s office. Later, several more deputies of the Dimitrovgrad City Duma lost their powers for violations in the declarations. At the same time, in 2013, eight deputies of the regional legislature from United Russia did not submit income declarations at all, but they were not deprived of their mandates.
Semyon Kiryak, a partner at the law firm Kiryak and Partners, told Kommersant that “based on the current practice, deputies in most cases are deprived of mandates after such violations are revealed” and “the amount of income from using such tools does not matter.” He also noted that “when opening an IIS in the BCS, the user undergoes authorization, which involves providing passport data and signing documents,” and “it will be extremely difficult to prove that the bank should have known about inaccurate information.”