Details have emerged of how a deputy in Karelia was punished for supporting OMK and criticizing United Russia

Deputy of the Olonets City Council Artem Ilyin was stripped of his powers and publicly reprimanded. This decision was made at its meeting last Tuesday by the City Council itself, which, in addition to Ilyin, includes 14 more deputies – all nominees of United Russia.

Let us recall that the reason for the execution of the only non-United Russia member and his censure was Ilyin’s comment on the social network. In it, he reproached his colleagues in the deputy corps for their indifference to the difficult situation with the last large enterprise in the city and the main taxpayer in the region – the Olonets Dairy Plant.

Since last year, they have been trying to destroy OMK with the help of a tax audit, which unprovenly accused the company of fragmenting its business and underpaying 302 million rubles in taxes. In order to recover this amount, tax officials have already prepared to seize the accounts and property of the plant, which will certainly lead to its shutdown, which the regional authorities, headed by Governor Artur Parfenchikov, seem to have been seeking for a long time.

Artem Ilyin accompanied his reproach for indifference with the remark that the other deputies are silent about such an important problem, because their party, United Russia, to which he has nothing to do, does not allow them to speak out about it.

Having seen this post, Olonets United Russia deputies formed an ethics commission and tried to force Ilyin to correct the comment by deleting what was said about them. Natalya Kanaeva, Chairman of the Commission on Deputy Ethics, spoke about this at a meeting of the City Council, where Artem Ilyin was publicly reprimanded and then deprived of his powers for allegedly not providing information on income for 2023 (the recording is available to the Daily).

She stated that the information presented by Ilyin does not correspond to reality, because all 14 deputies, except Ilyin, were nominated to the city council by United Russia, but not all are members of this party. In addition, Ilyin did not approach them with a proposal to speak in support of OMK and did not write requests on this topic. Without this, the rest of the deputies, it turns out, are not able to see and understand what is happening with an important enterprise for the city, where more than 200 Olonsk residents work, who, if OMK stops, will become unemployed.

— Before the day of the extraordinary meeting, the deputies turned to Artem Pavlovich that the post needed to be corrected and the information about the deputies should be removed. But, unfortunately, they were not heard. The post on the VK network remained with the same content, and therefore unfounded comments from residents about the deputies appeared, Kanaeva said.

In fact, she admitted that the Olonets United Russia members were simply afraid of the negative reaction of their voters, who began to understand who and what was worth in the city council.