The State Duma called for fining officials for using foreign messengers

A draft law has been submitted to the State Duma proposing to establish responsibility for sending personal and financial information through foreign messengers.The authors of the innovation are parliamentarians Anton Gorelkin, Roman Lyubarsky, Artem Kiryanov, Sergey Morozov, Gennady Panin, Vyacheslav Petrov and Anton Nemkin. They proposed to change the Administrative Code. Officials, according to the proposal of deputies, should be fined from 30,000 to 50,000 rubles, legal entities — from 100,000 to 700,000 rubles. The relevant restrictions apply from March 1. 

Gorelkin pointed out that civil servants will not be punished for using these messengers for personal purposes. Deputies "allow" to leave messengers for personal use and working communication, but only if it is not about providing a state or municipal service, fulfilling a state order or a municipal task. The change is required to "shift the emphasis towards Russian alternatives":

"Which is good both from the point of view of security and prevention of leaks, and in terms of infrastructure. I am not against the development of Russian fintech, but when banks integrate with foreign digital platforms, ignoring Russian ones, it is strategically wrong".

All federal agencies should switch to Russian messengers by May 1 of this year, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko said. So far, this messenger, which combines mail, cloud storage, an internal portal and a calendar, is already used by about 250 thousand Russian government officials. Now it is the turn of the regional authorities.

After the introduction of Western restrictions, many financial organizations transferred communication with customers to Telegram, but this caused dissatisfaction with Roskomnadzor. Credit institutions were required not to use messengers that have not received the approval of the department.