Interfax: Putin reminds officials of ethics of talking to media

NOVO-OGARYOVO, near Moscow. Nov 14 (Interfax) – Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned it is unacceptable for senior government figures to discuss a planned decision with the media before it has been discussed in government.

At a meeting of the supervisory board of the Strategic Initiatives Agency on Thursday, the president of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Sergei Katyrin, expressed fear with recent proposals for changing to tax laws meant that police would again be vested with authority that is believed to have adversely affected the business climate in Russia.

He said some senior officials had publicly objected to such a reform.

“I don’t know, to be quite honest, I’ve just been to Korea, to Vietnam,” said Putin. “I’ll see who says what about this. I’ll talk to my colleagues, we’ll sort it out. But it’s a very simple matter: I’ll have to remind them that there is a certain practice of dealing with matters before one talks to the media. Everybody knows that, if there’s somebody who disagrees with something, [they should do] what [former finance minister Alexei] Kudrin did a while ago – he went over into the expert community.”

“As regards officials, we have long had the practice of discussing everything either in government or at the president’s office. We do it jointly and absolutely democratically,” Putin said.

“All of us, of course, want to look pure as the driven snow, as they say, and liberal. But that is not our task. We are not actors. In making decisions of this kind, we must look for balanced decisions that would meet the interests of all social groups – the business community and the rest of society. It is an extremely important way of bringing it home to everyone that such decisions as balanced and just,” the president said.