MOSCOW — The chairman of the ethics committee in Russia’s lower house of Parliament temporarily relinquished his authority on Wednesday after bloggers posted a raft of documents on the Internet showing him as the owner of expensive real estate, including a luxury oceanfront apartment in South Beach, part of Miami Beach, as well as valuable property in Russia that he did not list on required disclosure forms.
The chairman, Vladimir A. Pekhtin, insisted in a televised statement that he had done nothing wrong, and that his voluntary surrender of authority over the ethics panel would last only for the duration of an investigation that he said would clear him.
But the documents, some of them easily available public property records, showed Mr. Pekhtin’s name on the deeds of at least three properties in Florida, including the South Beach apartment bought last year for nearly $1.3 million in a building where Mark Cuban, the billionaire owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, also owns a unit.
Mr. Pekhtin’s official income and property declaration form, posted on Parliament’s Web site, lists no property outside of Russia.
The disclosure of his real estate holdings and the allegations that he failed to properly disclose his assets came just a day after President Vladimir V. Putin proposed legislation that would bar senior Russian officials from holding bank accounts or owning stocks outside the country.
While neither Mr. Putin’s proposal nor any existing law prohibits officials from owning real estate overseas, the disclosure of Mr. Pekhtin’s holdings provided powerful ammunition for critics of Mr. Putin and of United Russia, the party that controls Parliament.
The anticorruption blogger and political opposition leader Aleksei Navalny posted copies of property records and photographs, along with a narrative dripping with sarcasm.
United Russia could entrust Parliament’s ethics committee “only to the most honest, decent and ethical member of the State Duma,” he wrote. “Otherwise, if it turns out this person is not tactful and ethical, it would be embarrassing.”
He noted that another lawmaker, Sergei Zheleznyak, had voiced strong nationalist views and demanded an end to foreign influences in Russia, only to have pictures emerge recently of his children who live and study abroad. Russian bloggers and news organizations were apparently tipped off about the property by someone calling himself Doctor Z, whom the business newspaper Vedmosti described as a researcher living in Spain.
In appearances on Russian television, Mr. Pekhtin said that the property abroad belonged to his son, Aleksei, who lived and worked in the United States.
“I do not have any property abroad,” he said. “There is property belonging to my son.”
In October, Vedmosti reported that Mr. Pekhtin and his wife owned a huge mansion outside St. Petersburg and several other properties near the Bay of Finland, but had disclosed owning only the land and not any buildings on it.
Other records showed that the Pekhtins had bought a number of properties in an area where the government planned to build a new roadway, essentially guaranteeing them cash compensation.
In his statement on television, Mr. Pekhtin said he reserved the right to defend himself in court if necessary.
Russian Ethics Official Steps Aside Over Property Disclosures
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Russian Ethics Official Steps Aside Over Property Disclosures
