Russian civil servants spent 1.8 billion rubles for gifts for themselves

The state bodies and corporations of Russia spent at least 8.1 billion rubles in preparation for the New Year. Of these, 1.8 billion - for gifts to themselves. This was reported by the "New Gazeta" with reference to the New Year's government procurement.

Gifts are held under the name "purchase of souvenirs", including Christmas toys, calendars, mittens, cup holders, most of the amount - 1.1 billion rubles - spent state -owned companies. Another 515 million rubles from the budget were spent on New Year's corporate parties.

The publication notes that the holiday most likely cost the state even more expensive. "Part of the New Year's state procurement did not fall into our unloading: officials could not indicate the keywords that we used to search for. For example, we did not find New Year's contracts at Sberbank, Rosneft, Aeroflot," New Gazeta writes.

Most of the money allocated for the celebration of the New Year went to the decoration of urban territories. 3.8 billion rubles were spent on this. Another 1.9 billion rubles were spent on sweet gifts for schoolchildren, orphans, large and poor families, children of state-owned companies and departments (Gazprom, Transneft, Rosseti, Alrosa, Roskosmos, FSIN, Prosecutor's Office).

The public procurement of the militarized departments of Russia, including the Russian Guard and the Federal Security Service, the FSB, the Ministry of Defense and the foreign intelligence service, will be classified from next year. The New Gazeta managed to find out that the Russian Guard purchased this year, for example, crystal shoulder straps, gilded checkers and dishes with a gold emblem of 12 million rubles.

The sample of keywords by which journalists analyzed public procurements included the words "souvenir", "gift", "New Year", "New Year", "holiday", "festive", "jewelry". The publication analyzed the expenses of the state from September 1 to December 8, 2021.

• Earlier, experts from the Higher School of Economics found that the volume of the corruption market in the public procurement system is 6.6 trillion rubles. These are equivalent to thirds of Russian budget revenues. The volume of rollbacks in this system exceeds the expenditure of the budget for education or healthcare.

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