RosPil is a public non-profit project organized by independent politician and lawyer A. Navalny at the end of 2010. The name comes from the popular slang term "Saw Money", which means the theft of budget funds allocated to state organizations for the necessary construction and repair work, the purchase of equipment, vehicles, supplies, etc. The officially declared goal of the project is the fight against abuse and corruption in public procurement.
Active participants in the project, analyzing announcements of public procurement conditions, (as a rule, on the website www.goszakupki.ru) draw conclusions that a particular procurement tender may contain corruption elements. After that, experts who study these contests more thoroughly are involved in the case, 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 procurements. Activists and project participants work on a voluntary basis, that is, they do not receive material compensation for their work. Lawyers, on the other hand, work under employment contracts, receiving remuneration from the funds in the project’s account.
Founder A. Navalny claims that the project is funded exclusively from private donations collected through the Yandex.Money payment system. The starting date for collecting donations is February 2, 2011. According to Navalny, in just 16 days about 4.5 million rubles were raised. Among the people who transferred the 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 intended to be registered as a legal entity, since, according to the explanations of the same A. Navalny, this would be fraught with excessive red tape and accountability, 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 freely available data, in the first three months of the project’s work alone, the implementation of procurement of corruption-doubtful purchases worth more than 330 million rubles was stopped. At the same time, A. Navalny has repeatedly argued that the goal of RosPila’s work is only to combat abuse and corruption, and not with the system of state orders, as such.
