cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/43977487

Web archive link

Russia’s lower-house State Duma on Thursday passed a package of bills exempting government officials from filing annual public financial declarations, a move lawmakers said would modernize oversight.

Under the legislation, financial monitoring of officials and their close relatives would instead be carried out through a closed state information system known as Poseidon, which tracks income, assets and property in real time. The system is integrated with other government databases, including those of the Federal Tax Service and the financial watchdog Rosfinmonitoring.

In December 2022, Putin suspended the mandatory publication of officials’ financial declarations for the duration of the war in Ukraine. Soon afterward, disclosures, including those filed before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, began disappearing from official websites.

Before that decree, Russian law had required civil servants to publicly disclose their income and assets, as well as those of immediate family members, under an anti-corruption framework introduced in 2008.