The Ministry of Justice will conduct an unscheduled inspection of the Pskov province

The Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation will check the newspaper "Pskov province". Denis Kamalyagin, editor-in-chief of the publication, told Meduza about this.

According to Kamalyagin, he was notified of the unscheduled inspection by the Department of the Ministry of Justice for the Pskov region. Testing will begin on June 2.

“Judging by the departments that will be checking — the tax agency, Rosfinmonitoring, and others — this is a desire to study the sources of funding,” Kamalyagin told Meduza. “In part, perhaps, it is possible to link the check with the upcoming elections.”

The formal basis for the inspection was the appeal of the chief federal inspector for the Pskov region, Alexei Ustinov. The latter, as Denis Kamalyagin suggests, is acting on the basis of a complaint from a certain D. Danilov (the document is at the disposal of Meduza). In the paper, Danilov's position is listed as "chairman of the primary trade union organization of the Russian Trade Union of Innovative and Small Enterprise Workers."

Danilov's letter to Federal Inspector Ustinov states that "Pskov Gubernia" has been "furiously and groundlessly criticizing our president" for many years, while at the same time claiming presidential grants.

“At one time, the leader of the Bolsheviks and the organizer of the famous October Revolution, Vladimir Lenin (Blank), admitted that he was taking money from foreign sponsors to fight the tsarist regime, but in order to take money from the Tsar-father to fight him, even Vladimir Ilyich, having the appropriate upbringing and manners, being a decent person, I could not afford, ”Danilov’s complaint says.

To the question of who exactly could initiate the check in relation to the "Pskov province", Denis Kamalyagin replied: "We have certain assumptions, but for now we do not want to talk about them out loud." The regional department of the Ministry of Justice stated that they did not know on whose application the check was initiated.

• The weekly newspaper Pskovskaya Guberniya has been published since 2000. One of its founders is Lev Shlosberg, an opposition politician and leader of the local branch of the Yabloko party.
• After the outbreak of the war in the Donbass, the Pskov Governorate investigated the circumstances of the death of Pskov paratroopers in July-September 2014.
• In September 2015, Shlosberg was deprived of his deputy powers in the legislative assembly of the Pskov region. In November, a criminal case was opened against the director of the Pskov province, Alexander Zakharov, under an article on forgery of documents.