Issue 4353. Last Updated: 03/19/2010

Moscow Cuts Some Pensions

The Moscow Times

City Hall will cut the November pensions of about 200,000 retirees who illegally collected bonus payments by concealing the fact that they were still working.

The city will halt the bonus payments to the working pensioners and deduct the money that they have illegally received, Kommersant reported Friday.

The extra payments consist of money paid on top of federal pensions and are popularly referred to as "Luzhkov bonuses," after Mayor Yury Luzhkov.

The deductions started on Nov. 1, said Oksana Turayeva, a senior official with City Hall's welfare department, Izvestia reported last week.

The working pensioners were discovered when the Pension Fund recalculated the pensions of all Russians, the newspapers said.

According to a City Hall order that came into force in November 2007, Moscow pensioners who do not work are entitled to receive extra money from City Hall in order to increase their pensions up to 6,800 rubles ($235) a month, the minimum wage in Moscow.

The average sum of a Luzhkov bonus is 2,900 rubles, Kommersant said.

City Hall will save at least 7 billion rubles ($242.7 million) in 12 months by stopping bonus payments to the 200,000 working pensioners, it said.




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