Russian Security Forces are confiscating the passports of high-ranking officials and heads of state-owned companies to prevent them from traveling abroad.
This is reported by the Financial Times (FT) with reference to several people familiar with the matter.
Different state institutions have different security measures. In places, they affect even middle-level officials, who have also been asked to refrain from foreign trips. In other departments, high-ranking officials are given full permission to travel abroad — "within reasonable limits."
According to one of the sources, the managers of one large state-owned industrial company are prohibited from leaving Moscow for more than two hours without official permission. In other cases, FSB officers have asked for the passports of former officials who previously had access to state secrets, and even those who never had access.
A former employee of the Central Bank of Russia Oleksandra Prokopenko informed that passport restrictions have now gone beyond the limits of people who have access to secret documents.
"Now they approach certain people and say, ʼPlease hand over your red civilian passports because you have access to sensitive information and thatʼs why we want to monitor your movements,ʼ" she noted.
The press secretary of the Russian president Dmytro Peskov also confirmed that restrictions on travel outside Russia for a number of employees in "sensitive areas" have become stricter.
Also, after a series of public scandals involving the vacations of deputies in Dubai and Mexico, the lower house of the Russian parliament in January demanded that lawmakers inform their superiors about foreign business trips. According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, at least seven regions have given local officials strict recommendations to refrain from traveling abroad.