MOSCOW, February 5. /TASS/. A working group of Russia’s Central Election Commission (CEC) has advised that Russia’s chief electoral body refrain from registering presidential hopeful Boris Nadezhdin of the Civic Initiative party as an official candidate to be listed on the ballot in next month’s election after determining that over 15% of the signatures submitted in support of Nadezhdin are fake, the politician’s election campaign said.

"A [CEC] working group has detected 15.348% of fraudulent signatures collected for Boris Nadezhdin. We protest the working group’s decision," Nadezhdin’s election team said, describing the decision as unfounded in a statement.

The CEC will make its final decision on Nadezhdin’s bid to be on the ballot at a meeting on February 7, his election campaigners said. Invalidated signatures should not exceed a limit of 5% of the total number submitted for a candidate to be officially registered.

Earlier on Monday, the working group handed protocols with results of the verification of signatures to Nadezhdin and Sergey Malinkovich, the leader of the Communists of Russia party, CEC Deputy Chair Nikolai Bulayev told TASS. As many as 60,000 signatures have been analyzed for each of the two contenders, he said.

So far, the CEC has registered candidates from three parliamentary parties: Leonid Slutsky of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), Vladislav Davankov of New People, and Nikolay Kharitonov of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF). Incumbent Russian President Vladimir Putin, a self-nominated candidate for re-election to a fifth term in Russia’s highest office, is the fourth presidential hopeful to be officially registered by the federal election authority.