The prosecutor's office in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, city in the east of Russia, suspects that the Mayor Andrew Lobkin have a property abroad, according to ee24.com and newspaper "Izvestia".
Tax return of Mr Lobkin for 2012 was available in the website of city administration. His income was amounted to 26.7 million rubles, including 3.7 million rubles in major workplace. The mayor owns two houses, apartment and garage.
Shortly before the submission of the tax return, Andrew Lobkin has divorced with his wife, who has an American passport and owns several houses in the US. One of them was sold to her by Mr Lobkin 8 years ago - in the very year when Lobkin became the Mayor. The prosecutors suspect that the divorce (by the way, after 35 years of marriage) is coincided with the filing of the declaration not by chance .
However, Andrew Lobkin is not the first Mayor in Russia implicated in the scandal. Portal ee24.com earlier wrote about the wife of the Mayor of Kaliningrad. She has built a villa in Cote d'Azur but forgot to mention it in the declaration.
Let us recall that in the second half of 2012, there were discussions in Russia about the need to ban officials and their families to own foreign real estate. But, thanks to the Supreme Court decision, this clause wasn't included in the text of the law.