Translated material
Fifth element
The Federation Council is gradually recognizing itself as a chamber of “werewolves”
On June 3, Chairman of the Federation Council Sergei Mironov sent to the parliament of Kalmykia a proposal for the early termination of the powers of Senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan. This is already the fifth senator who has an almost 100% chance of losing his seat over the past month. If the “fight against corruption” in the upper house of parliament proceeds at such a pace, senators will change at a speed that clearly does not allow them to defend the interests of their regions.Since the first term of Vladimir Putin’s reign, the Federation Council stopped forming the upper house from popularly elected governors and heads of regional legislative assemblies, it has become a place where people not only have no connection with the regions that delegated them, but often have an ambiguous reputation. However, for at least the last five years, until May of this year, when Senate Speaker Sergei Mironov “suddenly” discovered “werewolves” in the ranks of the chamber entrusted to him, for some reason this did not bother anyone.
In the case of the recall of Mr. Chakhmakhchyan, Speaker Mironov, unlike the four previous ones, was guided not by his own complaints about the work of his subordinate, but by materials from the FSB. On June 2, as a result of a special operation, 300 thousand were found in one of Levon Chakhmakhchyan’s companions and in his presence, marked by special forces operatives. Levon Chakhmakhchyan himself claims that everything that is happening is a provocation directed against him: “This provocation was organized against me by the president of one of the Russian airlines . I didn’t touch either the money or the bag with the money and didn’t even know about the contents of this bag.”
Yesterday, the Prosecutor General's Office reported that during the arrest, money was actually found not on the senator himself, but on one of the two people with whom the senator was with.
“When identifying Chakhmakhchyan, it was found out that he is a member of the Federation Council, and therefore no procedural measures were applied to him, since he has immunity,” the Prosecutor General’s Office said in a statement. Two and a half hours after his arrest, Mr. Chakhmakhchyan was released.
Levon Chakhmakhchyan was elected as a member of the Federation Council from Kalmykia in 2004. In the upper house of the Russian parliament, he worked as deputy chairman of the committee on local government issues. Before that, he worked for a long time in the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Armenia, then in the office of the President of the USSR, in the Russian government. In 1996, he was the head of the election campaign of the presidential candidate from the Workers' Self-Government Party, the famous Russian ophthalmologist Svyatoslav Fedorov. In 2000, he was elected chairman of the Workers' Self-Government Party. The party is part of the All-Russian political left-democratic social movement “Russia” of Gennady Seleznev.
Sergei Mironov, commenting on his decision on Monday, admitted that the process of resignation of senators early on the initiative of the head of the chamber does not contribute to the growth of its authority. “I did not indicate the reasons for the letter to the People’s Khural of Kalmykia, but I think that this time my colleagues will not have questions, as was the case with the resignation of four senators, which also happened on my initiative,” Mr. Mironov explained. Thus, indirectly recognizing that the questions that arose last time, when senators were asked to recall without any reasoning, were justified.
Let us recall that in May the Chairman of the Federation Council sent to the regions proposals for the early recall of four members of the Federation Council - the representative of Primorye Igor Ivanov, the representative of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug Boris Gutin, the member of the Senate from Khakassia Arkady Sarkisyan and the Nenets senator Alexander Sabadash. Moreover, the latter was dismissed with the wording “for entrepreneurial activities incompatible with the status of a member of the Federation Council.”
The issue of Levon Chakhmakhchyan’s resignation, according to Mr. Mironov, can be discussed by Kalmyk parliamentarians at an extraordinary meeting. Then senators will be able to remove the senator from office at the meeting on June 23.