Hold onto your seats, folks. Florida might have just done something awesome. It’s at the expense, though, of Russian lawmaker Vladimir A. Pekhtin.
“A senior lawmaker from Russia’s ruling party, who was also the chairman of Parliament’s ethics committee, resigned from the legislature on Wednesday over revelations that he owned more than $1.3 million worth of luxury real estate in Florida that he did not list on required disclosure forms,” reported The New York Times.
The ethics committee he was in charge of was part of the State Duma, a lower house in Russia’s parliament.
“The Duma has been a hotbed of passionate anti-American activity recently, passing laws forcing organizations that receive funds from abroad to register as foreign agents, banning adoptions by Americans and flirting with limiting such Western influences as foreign films,” according to an article by The Washington Post.
The fact that the dude in charge of something pretty anti-American owned a whole bunch of luxury property in Florida makes him look so, so bad. He left his position over this whole issue, all because a blogger from the opposition made allegations toward his property-owning status.
“Last week, Alexei Navalny, an anti-corruption activist, posted compromising photographs and property records showing Pekhtin’s name on the deeds to two condos in Miami Beach and another in Ormond Beach,” reported The Washington Post. “Pekhtin said the real estate was owned by his son, who lives in the United States, but both names were on the deeds. He soon relinquished the chairmanship of his committee — temporarily, he said.”
He said he had not broken any law, according to The New York Times, but that “‘there are very controversial documents that have been made public on the Internet,’ and it was necessary to clear up “‘obvious legal misunderstandings.’” How hysterical is it that Florida is again at the center of a political scandal? We didn’t do anything too bad this time, though.
“President Vladimir Putin has been trying to seize the anti-corruption mantle from the opposition and has proposed a law prohibiting government officials from having foreign stocks or bank accounts, although it leaves property ownership untouched,” stated The Washington Post. Ha, good luck, buddy.
There are few things you can learn from the United States as a whole; an easy lesson is how to be corrupt in government. We’ve got this one covered. The opposition party or forces (basically, the people who don’t always side with the government or with Putin) are the ones who are pro-anti-corruption. Russian authorities have frequently fought against bloggers like Navalny by bringing charges of fraud against those rebellious people.
Sorry Florida was so intriguing to your lawmakers that they didn’t list them on official documents. Sorry our beaches are just too pristine or that our Spanish food is sometimes on point.
We realize we’re writing an editorial about a country that will never read this, let alone change their entire basis of policy on our small words.
