March 16, 2012, 16:36 Cars

Officials will be put on a “screwdriver”

The Ministry of Economic Development proposes to limit officials from purchasing expensive cars under government orders

The Ministry of Economic Development proposes to transfer minor officials to domestically produced cars, leaving the right to buy luxury foreign cars only to persons subject to state protection. However, in the understanding of the MER, BMW and Toyota, assembled in Russia, are considered domestic.

The system for purchasing cars for business use is transparent and simple. You need to place an application with technical requirements on the government procurement website and select the most favorable price from all applications for the implementation of the tender. To get the car you want, you just need to write down its exact characteristics, including dimensions, engine size, power and a list of options, so that even classmates of this car are not included in the tender.

In addition, today when purchasing a fleet of vehicles, officials have no restrictions on price, equipment and volume.

Thanks to this Budget Code, even an average official can purchase a luxury limousine worth more than 8 million rubles with taxpayers’ money.

According to an audit by the Accounts Chamber, from October 2010 to March 2011, Russian officials spent about 2 billion rubles on the purchase of cars under government orders. Data on later inspections could not be found. The auditors found that federal executive authorities independently determine the type and cost of purchased vehicles intended to perform the same task. And officials of the same level from different regions can order cars of different classes and configurations for themselves, based only on the volume of the regional budget or their own appetites.

The Accounts Chamber also noted a trend toward “an unreasonable increase in the cost of cars” due to options such as multi-zone climate control, leather steering wheel, leather interior trim, chrome body trim, etc.

The FAS admits that in the Budget Code, which regulates all government orders, there is no rule establishing the maximum contract price for specific types of departments, and officials do not violate the law. Thus, the little-known Volga State Basin Administration of Waterways and Shipping in Nizhny Novgorod last year purchased a Toyota Land Cruiser 200 limited anniversary version for 3.6 million rubles, and the administration of Astrakhan purchased a Mercedes-Benz S500 4Matic for 6.8 million rubles.

Back in July 2011, the FAS promised to submit a bill to the State Duma establishing restrictions on the purchase of cars, but so far no proposals have been received from the agency.

But they appeared at the Ministry of Economic Development ( MED ), after this week Dmitry Medvedev approved the National Anti-Corruption Plan for 2012–2013, according to which civil servants are required not only to declare their property, but also to explain from what income luxury cars and elite real estate.

On Thursday, Deputy Head of the Ministry of Economic Development Mikhail Oseevsky said that the ministry had decided to come up with an initiative to limit officials in the purchase of cars. Officials should drive domestically produced cars, the deputy head of the Ministry of Economic Development believes, stipulating that foreign cars produced in Russia should also be classified as domestic cars.

In other words, if the initiative of the Ministry of Economic Development is legislatively approved, one should not expect that officials will switch to domestic Ladas or GAZ will resume production of the Volga specifically for the state apparatus. BMW business-class sedans, used by mid-level officials, are assembled in Kaliningrad, models of the same level are produced near St. Petersburg by Toyota and Nissan, and Volkswagen and Skoda are assembled near Kaluga. True, no one assembles limousines in our country yet.

The Ministry of Economic Development is ready to make an exception only for top officials of the state and persons protected under the law “On State Security”: only they, according to the plans of the Ministry of Economic Development, will be able to qualify for the purchase of luxury cars of foreign manufacture.

In addition, the ministry plans to analyze how many cars each ministry and department needs and for whom. The number of vehicles allocated and the maximum price for each vehicle may vary by region.

The Ministry of Economic Development gave itself a month to develop the bill. Oseevsky said that the finished document will be presented to the State Duma at the end of April.

The initiative of the Ministry of Economic Development on the eve of the change of ministerial portfolios looks like an attempt to remind oneself of oneself by guessing the direction of the weather vane of power and, quite likely, does not carry any practical value.

Now, when monitoring the government procurement website, you can regularly find Toyota Land Cruiser SUVs in lots. Taking into account the initiative of the Ministry of Economic Development, this car, popular among officials, may be included in the “stop list”. However, Toyota Motor is already negotiating with Sollers about the possibility of large-scale assembly of the Land Cruiser in Vladivostok at the facilities of the plant where SsangYong is assembled. The parties created a joint venture in March last year, and the first batch of Russian Land Cruisers, which are popular with Russian officials, should roll off the assembly line early next year. Audi already had experience producing cars in Kaluga in 2009–2010, and the Kaluga enterprise also produced the Audi A6 model, which was widespread among average officials and deputies. With the increase in production of Volkswagen models, Audi assembly was discontinued, but in November last year the company announced that it was considering the possibility of returning Audi to the Kaluga plant.

Mercedes, and even premium Jaguar and Land Rover periodically talk about the possibility of coming to Russia. Considering the volume of domestic government orders, from which billions of rubles are allocated for the purchase of cars, we can safely predict that manufacturers of luxury foreign cars will find ways to expand production to meet the needs of the Russian authorities. The fact that this market is extremely attractive in the eyes of foreign companies is eloquently demonstrated by the scandal surrounding Daimler, whose managers paid bribes to our officials to buy Mercedes cars for government needs.

At the same time, experts in the field of government procurement have repeatedly exposed officials who invented schemes according to which the lot was arranged exactly as it was convenient for them, for a specific car or a specific supplier.

Considering that the officials are still the same, they will probably still be able to use their ingenuity to change the Russian-made Camry or Teana sofa for a more familiar chair in BMW or Mercedes limousines.

A striking example of such a trick has already been demonstrated by the administration of Yekaterinburg city manager Alexander Jacob, to whom the Mercedes was leased. And the true owner, MUP Ekaterinburgenergo, which has colossal debts, purchased an expensive foreign car on a general basis at a car dealership. In turn, the administration of the Sverdlovsk region, when ordering a Mercedes-Benz S500 for Governor Alexander Misharin, replaced the Latin letter M in the brand name with a Cyrillic one, which obviously reduced the number of potential sellers. In both cases, the court declared the transactions legal.