MOSCOW, October 25 (Itar-Tass) - Salaries of deputies of the State Duma, the lower house of Russian parliament, are expected to increase twofold, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, the leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia said Friday at the hearings held by the Public Chamber, which is the highest public consultative body in this country.
The hearings were devoted to the mechanism of revoking deputies from regional and municipal agencies of power.
“Now the salary is about to go up twofold, and so who will ever quit the position?” he said. “You just sit there and do nothing and get a pay of 300,000 rubles /a month/. And the amount will go up to 400,000 rubles in spring and then it’ll be half a million rubles, and all of that for being in the seventh heaven.”
At the current exchange rate, USD 1 is equivalent of 31.7 Russian rubles.
“A general increase of government officials’ salaries is expected and the MPs are equated to them automatically,” Zhirinovsky told Itar-Tass. “The salaries will double today’s size. These increases take place regularly, in fact.”
In the meantime, seventy percent MPs “do that job very poorly - they just don’t do anything at all.”
“On the one hand, they don’t see any sphere of activity for themselves,” Zhirinovsky said. “On the other, they don’t want any activity or else they have gotten there just to get the title.”
“As for me personally, I’d give them 50,000 rubles a month and establish the annual rotation of ten percent MPs,” he said.
Zhirinovsky, who has led his party faction in all the six convocations of the State Duma since its re-establishment in 1993, supported the Public Chamber’s efforts to devise a mechanism of revocation of the deputies. He believes however that the right to revoke them should be given to the leaders of parties or party factions.