The funding scheme that a Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny has been using extensively is in direct violation of the election legislation, the deputy head of the United Russia Party’s Central Executive Committee, Konstantin Mazurevsky said. According to the official, the election legislation contains a clear-cut definition of a voter’s free-will contribution, which means a gratuitous donation by a Russian citizen of their own money resources. The money is transferred to the candidate’s election campaign account. The law thus prohibits the so-called two-stage donations to election campaign accounts, whereby the money first comes from unidentified third persons to the donors that the candidate is familiar with, and then these individuals transfer the contributions in question on their behalf to the candidate’s special-purpose election campaign account as their own money, although this is not their money, Mazurevsky said.The United Russia official added that court practice bears out the unlawfulness of this kind of donation.
The Liberal Democratic Party leader, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, said earlier that he would ask Russian Prosecutor-General Yuri Chaika to launch probe into who sends money to Yandex Purse for the Moscow mayoral candidate Alexei Navalny. Zhirinovsky claims that blogger Navalny has thus accumulated 20 million roubles on his campaign account.
Meanwhile, Navalny has said he will make public all the donations to his election campaign. ‘We have collected some 30 million roubles by now’, he writes on his Live Journal blog post. He said he would also make public the per-region amounts contributed and the time of contribution.