The election runners and potential candidates didn’t transparently declare the collected incomes and the costs incurred directly and indirectly for conducting the signature collection process or the election campaign, programs director at Promo-LEX Association Pavel Postica stated in an interview for Radio Free Europe, quoted by IPN.
Pavel Postica said in all its reports so far, Promo-LEX highlighted this problem and warned the Central Election Commission and election runners to be as transparent as possible in this regard. There is no direct connection between party financing and election campaign funding.
The programs director noted that not all the parties submitted financial reports to the CEC. “There are candidates fielded by political parties who didn’t file financial reports for the first half of 2016. So, from our viewpoint, the situation regarding party funding is slightly more serious than that concerning election campaign funding as the penalties in this case can be rather harsh and applied swiftly and we saw this in the case of Inna Popenko,” stated Pavel Postica.
According to him, the punishment with the annulment of the registration is not always applied when it should and the election runners bear the blame here as they are not very tempted to challenge the actions of their opponents in court because they know that they commit such irregularities too. On the other hand, neither the Central Election Commission was very harsh.
