The St.Petersburg Legislative Assembly rejected an inquiry from Grigory Yavlinsky, leader of the YABLOKO faction in the Legislative Assembly, on non-implementation of the city budget. The Legislative Assembly referred to its new regulations. The YABLOKO faction will seek in court to cancel the new procedure for filing inquiries to officials. Meanwhile Yavlinsky expressed his concern about the «very unsatisfactory state of affairs in the budgetary process of St. Petersburg» and wants to know what measures Governor Georgy Poltavchenko is going to adopt so that to amend the situation.

In his deputy inquiry Grigory Yavlinsky appeals to the Governor «in view of an extremely poor state of affairs in the budgetary process of St. Petersburg».

This is confirmed by the data recently published by the Committee of Finance, according to which only 0.6% of funds were distributed as of on March 1, 2013.

Grigory Yavlinsky recalls that in April 2012, he already sent an inquiry to the Governor, when only 8.6% of St. Petersburg budget for 2011 was implemented. Governor Poltavchenko said that the situation «did not require any action.» However, in 2012 non-implementation of the budget grew by 1.5 times — to 12.6%.
Yavlinsky is certain that the chronic failure to implement the budget
is due not only to the poor performance of the city government, but «first of all by deep systemic flaws of the budgetary process in St. Petersburg, lack of professionalism at all the stages of development, adoption and implementation of the budget and the huge scale corruption in the city». According to Yavlinsky, the Governor’s statements on the «need to implement the budget», deprivation of officials of bonuses and even dismissals of some of the officials can not change the situation.
In view of this Grigory Yavlinsky asks Governor Georgy Poltavchenko to inform the Legislative Assembly what remedial measures he is going to take.