You Won't Be Disappointed

What Wang Ye called "seeking sponsorship" was merely a tactful way of putting it.

Everyone knew perfectly well where the money would actually come from.

Wang Ye would definitely be paying out of his own pocket!

He would simply donate it in the names of the many corporate groups under his control, keeping up appearances and avoiding suspicion.

But Russia was not particularly strict about such things either. After all, it had not practiced "democracy" for very long, and there were still plenty of loopholes.

People did not even take those rules all that seriously.

When campaigning for Duma seats, everyone used whatever methods they had at their disposal.

Take Wang Ye, for instance. When he ran in Chukotka, he had relied on the ultimate weapon—vodka—to crush every competitor, achieving an astonishing approval rating!

Other candidates were much the same. They simply did not have Wang Ye's extravagant resources...

Now that Wang Ye had publicly stated that he would put up one hundred million US dollars from his own pocket to support everyone's reelection campaigns, the Duma members present were absolutely overjoyed.

The Third Faction did not have many Duma seats to begin with, only around thirty. Some of those were effectively "fixed allocations," leaving only a dozen or so seats that truly needed to be contested.

There was no need to give too much. If every candidate received a few million US dollars, winning those seats would be effortless!

There might even be quite a bit left over to "snatch" seats from the other factions.

Perhaps in the next Duma, the Third Faction could hold fifty seats—or even more...

Watching the handsome, upright Mikhail become the focus of the entire conference room, surrounded as though by a host of stars, Zhirinov had to admit, however unwilling he was,