Fishing with live bait

The governor of Kamchatka filed a lawsuit against the mayor of the regional center

Governor of the Kamchatka region Mikhail Mashkovtsev filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Petropavlovsk Vladislav Skvortsov. The reason for the legal battle was a tent city set up by fishermen who were dissatisfied with the way the regional authorities distribute quotas for aquatic and biological resources.

Trade unions of workers in the fishing industry of the peninsula have resumed their siege of the Kamchatka administration after a break that lasted several months. As the organizer of this action, deputy of the regional parliament Irina Orlova, told a Vremya Novostey correspondent, “the picketers stood under the windows of the governor’s office throughout June and half of July.” After the fishermen's complaints against Governor Mashkovtsev were heard by the Russian Prosecutor General's Office and the Accounts Chamber, the protesters curtailed their action. During this time, four large fishing enterprises, which this year were not allowed to catch valuable species of fish, filed lawsuits against the regional authorities in arbitration courts and won them.

However, the governor said that he could not implement the court’s decision, since redistributing limits in the midst of industrial fishing would lead to even more dire consequences for the region’s fishing industry. In addition, as the head of Kamchatka noted, only those teams that at the beginning of the year did not have a penny of debt to the budget of the Kamchatka region were allowed to participate in the competition for the distribution of fish resources.

As a result of this approach, as Ms. Orlova reported, 40 Kamchatka enterprises did not receive quotas for the extraction of biological resources, and fish off the coast of the peninsula is now caught by companies from Primorye, Khabarovsk Territory and Sakhalin, which could not have any debts to the budget of Kamchatka. definition. Debt to the tax authorities, according to the general director of the Akros joint-stock company Valery Vorobyov, arose among most local enterprises during the extremely unsuccessful Putin of 2004, when fishermen did not take even half of the predicted quotas for red fish.

However, according to the law, fishing cooperatives pay taxes not on the actual catch, but on the maximum limit. It was these circumstances that forced Kamchatka fishermen to return to the square. According to the organizers of the action, on October 16, they received permission from the administration of the city of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to hold mass protests for a month.

In the recent past, Governor Mikhail Mashkovtsev himself organized tent cities in front of the local White House. It was he who took the initiative to fight against the Kamchatka governor Vladimir Biryukov, who ruled in the late 90s, with the help of direct actions. Now Mr. Mashkovtsev himself is seeking protection from the law from picketers.

As the governor noted, he did not entrust his lawyers to write the statement of claim to the court, but drafted it himself. In his statement, the first person of the region refers to the provisions of the federal law “On meetings, rallies, demonstrations, processions and pickets.” According to this document, mass protests in Russia are allowed only from seven in the morning to 23:00 local time. The picketers, represented by deputy Irina Orlova, assured that they strictly fulfill this requirement - exactly an hour before midnight, all slogans and visual propaganda are removed into a specially equipped tent, and at exactly seven in the morning all this stuff is installed again on the square.

However, according to Governor Mashkovtsev, the objects of visual propaganda should certainly include the tents themselves in which the picketers spend the night. And what’s more, a massive whaleboat with the inscription “Aurora” stands on the square around the clock. Fishermen dragged this vessel to the protest site on October 19, for which the driver of the truck transporting the ship almost lost his license for unauthorized transportation of oversized cargo. In his statement of claim, Mikhail Mashkovtsev accuses the mayor of Petropavlovsk, Vladislav Skvortsov, of “illegal inaction” and asks the court to oblige the mayor to disperse the fishing picket as soon as possible.

Mr. Skvortsov himself considers such attacks on him from the communist governor to be natural. He does not see any violation of current legislation in his actions. Vladislav Skvortsov promised journalists that he would personally control the picketers. To do this, he undertook to come to the main city square every evening at 11 pm and ensure that the picketers removed the visual propaganda on time. Speaking in general about the prospects for a possible solution to the problem, the Petropavlovsk mayor said that he considers the governor’s lawsuit against the mayor of the regional capital a precedent. It is possible that the dispute over the rules for holding mass protests will have to reach the Constitutional Court of Russia, the mayor emphasized.

Ilya SERGEEV, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky