Opposition leader Alexei Navalny has revealed the list of sponsors contributing to his Anti-Corruption Fund, which is poised to gather even more donations with the "Navalny credit card" that is in the works, national media reported Wednesday.
"The Anti-Corruption Fund has reached agreements with 11 businessmen and 5 representatives of the public, raising 4.4 million rubles ($136,000), and another four million are already promised for the second half of the year," Navalny told Vedomosti.
"The donors are not under contractual obligation to give to the fund, but many have promised to contribute regularly," he added.
Some of the donors include Rosgosstrakh vice president Roman Borisovich, Alfa Group's strategic planning director Alexei Savchenko, billionaire Alexander Lebedev, venture capital investor Sergei Filonov, and Boris Zimin, the son of VimpelCom founder Dmitry Zimin, among others.
"I think that the fight with [corruption] should be a part of being a citizen for every normal person," fund contributor Borisovich told Vedomosti.
"This is not a political project, but a civil debt owed by people who think. It is necessary that the leadership of the country supports this fight, and there is nothing illegal about donations," sponsor Sergei Filonov said.
United Russia Duma Deputy Ilya Kostunov said last week that he sent an official request to the FSB and the Federal Financial Monitoring Service to check Navalny's Yandex.Money accounts for evidence of money laundering, including a request to check whether it was legal for Navalny's Anti-Corruption Fund to receive money from a co-branded credit card reportedly in the works.
The card, announced earlier this month, would put 1 percent of all purchases made with the card toward the fund. The money would not come from the cardholder's account, but from the partner bank.
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