Audit Chamber discovers 50 bln rbl budget violations in 2020

MOSCOW, Aug 19 (PRIME) -- The Audit Chamber of Russia has discovered budget violations totaling 50 billion rubles in 2020, Head Alexei Kudrin told President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday.

“We discovered 20 violations that the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Investigative Committee are to assess, we sent the documents to them. We sent 131 notifications to the Audit Chamber on violations made by the ministries. The violations amount to about 50 billion rubles, including misuse of public funds, violation of financial accounting, wrong reflection of objects and spending in accounting, and violation of state procurement procedures,” Kudrin said.

The Audit Chamber will also inspect spending of budget funds allocated to the purchase of lung ventilators and other equipment meant to fight the coronavirus, and payments to the medical workers that worked with the coronavirus patients, he said.

He said that the Audit Chamber had discovered that over the past three years, the authorities and gas giant Gazprom finished only 15% of planned gas infrastructure development.

Kudrin mentioned lower financing as the reason behind the lag. “Gas delivery is usually unprofitable because the self-cost is usually higher than the tariff. Gazprom usually covers the loss with export revenue, which is now also falling. That is why that creates new risks for the dates completion,” he said.

Other reasons include the lack of synchronization of activities of the company and the regional authorities and a significant consumer debt. “The accumulated consumer debt to the company stands at 331 billion (rubles). … There are different reasons for that, we are working on them,” he said.

(73.4321 rubles – U.S. $1)

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