RosPil is a public non-profit project organized by an independent politician and lawyer A. Navalny at the end of 2010. The name comes from the popular slang expression "To cut money", which means theft of budget funds allocated to state organizations for the necessary construction and repair work, the purchase of equipment, transport, consumables, etc. The officially announced goal of the project is to combat abuse and corruption in public procurement.
The active participants of the project, analyzing the announcements about the conditions of public procurement, (as a rule, on the website www.goszakupki.ru) conclude that this or that procurement tender may contain corrupt elements. After that, experts are involved in the case, who study these competitions more thoroughly, evaluating them from the point of view of possible corruption. And the project lawyers send complaints to the relevant authorized bodies, demanding the cancellation of these competitive purchases. The activists and project participants work on a voluntary basis, that is, they do not receive material remuneration for their work. Lawyers, on the other hand, work under labor contracts, receiving remuneration from the funds in the project's account.
Founder A. Navalny claims that the project is financed exclusively by private donations collected using the Yandex. Money payment system. The starting date for collecting donations is February 2, 2011. According to Navalny, about 4.5 million rubles were collected in just 16 days. Among the people who transferred money to the project was even the governor of the Perm Territory O. Chirkunov, who allocated 25 thousand rubles for this purpose.
From the very beginning, RosPil was not supposed to be registered as a legal entity, because, according to the explanations of the same A. Navalny, this is fraught with excessive bureaucracy and reporting, and would also give the authorities the opportunity to complicate the work of RosPil through endless checks and claims from many controlling organizations.
According to publicly available data, only in the first three months of the project, the implementation of dubious in a corruption sense purchases in the amount of over 330 million rubles was stopped. At the same time, A. Navalny has repeatedly argued that the purpose of RosPil's work is only to combat abuse and corruption, and not to the system of state orders as such.
