Data about the owners of yachts and villas will be removed from public access

The State Duma supported the idea of classifying information about the owners of yachts and villas. The head of the property committee, a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, Sergei Gavrilov, told Kommersant FM about this. According to him, the personal data of the owners should not be available to the general public. Earlier it became known that the FSB submitted to the government a bill on concealing information about the owners of real estate, aircraft and ships. In addition to the copyright holders themselves, only “competent government bodies” will have access to this data. The document will arrive in the State Duma by the end of the week, said Sergei Gavrilov.

“I haven’t seen this bill yet, it’s hard to say to what extent it was initiated by the Federal Security Service. There will be a government meeting on Thursday, we will study the text again, but in principle the idea is correct. This is not a question of protecting luxury real estate, it is a question that for a certain circle of participants, for example, civil servants and so on, explicit access to personal data regarding specific places and volumes may be available to law enforcement agencies, perhaps to the media, but only with signing a non-proliferation agreement so that there are no grounds for raiding, threats, and so on. The secrecy of information should not be evidence of the secrecy of sources of acquisition. The capabilities of the Investigative Committee and the prosecutor’s office will, of course, be expanded in this regard,” Gavrilov promised.

It is proposed to classify information about the owners of yachts and villas from specialized state registers. Currently, all the information in them is publicly available, and anyone can request them. The FSB is worried that this data could be used for criminal and compromising purposes. The main reason is to eliminate the selfish component in the so-called “snitch law,” says Sergei Strelnikov, a member of the government expert council and member of the anti-corruption working group.

“The document did not undergo any expert discussion. He took a different path related to the upcoming changes in anti-corruption legislation - the law, which was proposed by the Ministry of Labor, “On the protection of applicants and witnesses about facts of corruption.” The law has already been popularly nicknamed the “snitch law”; it assumes certain bonuses from the amount of money that will be returned to the state. What can applicants do? They can, by accessing the database, target certain properties,” Strelnikov explained.

The main purpose of classifying the data of the owners of villas and yachts is to prevent activists who find undeclared property from officials. Anti-Corruption Foundation lawyer Lyubov Sobol is confident of this.

“There is no objective need to hide this information. On the contrary, world practice is that as much information as possible is published and made available in the public domain. Those who will suffer are mainly ordinary people who check real estate when making any transactions; this will have a very negative impact on the real estate market. Naturally, they will find some other opportunity to verify their claims against officials who live beyond their means. What specifically prompted the writing of the bill was a set of investigations that were carried out by the Anti-Corruption Foundation on the real estate of Dmitry Peskov’s wife Navka, the real estate of Patrushev’s wife and other publications of a bunch of other people,” Sobol believes.

According to RBC, the Ministry of Economic Development has approved a bill on classifying data on yachts and villas. The department has sent proposals that can be taken into account in preparation for the second reading in the State Duma.

Alexandra Zharkova-Djordjevic

“Mostly ordinary people will suffer”