Putin Foes, Cashflows

Alexander Lebedev is taking opposition politics to a whole new level.  His National Reserve Bank is to begin issuing a new debit card that will donate 1% of all purchases to RosPil, Alexei Navalny’s corruption-fighting organisation.  Lebedev even has hopes that Vladimir Putin will be one of the first to receive this card – although that seems categorically unlikely, given that it was Navalny who coined the epithet ‘the party of crooks and thieves’ to describe Putin’s beloved United Russia.

“I’d like to ‘marry’ this project with the authorities’ official position, so that on the official level, the authorities support citizens’ intention to finance the struggle against corruption themselves,” Lebedev said.

He added that he wanted “to approach Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] as a citizen, so he shows us all by example.”

Lebedev said he hoped Putin would get the first of the 40,000 to 50,000 debit cards his bank initially plans to issue as part of the project.

For a more light-hearted approach to bank cards and the Kremlin, have a look at socialite Ksenia Sobchak’s new commercial for a Russian credit card company, in which she mocks the recent politically-motivated ransacking of her home and confiscating of her cash, turning it instead into a joke narrative about keeping your money safe.