This year Russian law enforcers have stopped the illegal operations of 12,500 corrupt officials, Prosecutor General Yury Chaika has said.
He said they registered over 9,500 crimes related to corruption - giving and receiving bribes.
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November 21, 2006Chechnya’s law enforcement services have arrested Compensation Payments Commission Secretary Sultan Isakov, the Interfax news agency reported on Wednesday referring to the statement made by Chechnya’s Prosecutor Valery Kuznetsov.
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November 16, 2006Corrupt Russian officials are estimated to take bribes of US$240 billion a year, an amount almost equal to the state’s entire revenues, a senior prosecutor said in an interview with the government daily printed Tuesday.
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November 7, 2006According to a report by an independent Russian think tank INDEM, corruption is still rampant in Russia forcing businessmen to part with 7 percent of theirturnover which they spend on bribes.
The Head of the IDEM foundation Georgy Satarov has presented the anti-corruption report “Business and Corruption. Problems of Countering 2006†on Monday Kommersant daily reports.
The research including interviewing of Russian businessmen was carried out in three Russian cities Moscow, Volgograd and Smolensk.It was discovered that Russian businessman gives bribes twice a year on the average.
IDEM analysts say corruption in Russia is rapidly increasing for the period from 2002 to 2005 it went up 900 percent. As the experts of the foundation reports only 1 out of 100,000 corrupt goes to prison, so chances to fine oneself behind the bards for a bribe taker is 0.0013 percent in Russia.
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November 1, 2006Russian Natural Resources Minister Yuri Trutnev earned the ruble equivalent of $7.9 million last year, the most of any cabinet member. Economy Minister German Gref earned the least, about $45,000, a Russian daily reported Friday.
Trutnev’s income is double what he made in 2004 and about 18 times the 12 million rubles ($448,000) declared by Transportation Minister Igor Levitin, the second biggest earner in the cabinet.
The incomes were published in Rossiskaya Gazeta, the official government newspaper. No explanations are given in the annual income declarations of senior government officials. Prime Minster Mikhail Fradkov said he made 1.8 million rubles.
Trutnev, a former governor of the Perm region, is leading an investigation that may halt construction work at Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s $22 billion Sakhalin-2 project, Russia’s largest foreign investment, the Bloomberg news agency reports.
Trained as an oil engineer, Trutnev, 50, spent most the 1980s working for Komsomol, the Communist Party’s youth league, according to his ministry’s Web site. He was named Natural Resources Minister in March 2004. He declared income for that year of $3.8 million, Vedomosti newspaper reported in January.
Levitin also disclosed he owns a country house, an apartment and a 3,000 square meter plot of land, all listed as being in Russia. Communications Minister Leonid Reiman, who posted income 11.02 million rubles, owns 5 apartments, 2 plots of land and a country house. He also has a one-quarter stake in a sixth apartment.
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October 27, 2006A former Yukos banker wanted in Russia on embezzlement charges will not be extradited, Lithuania’s Court of Appeal quoted by RIA Novosti ruled Monday.
Lithuania granted provisional asylum last October to Igor Babenko, 55, a former manager of the embattled oil company Yukos’ Menatep St. Petersburg bank affiliate in southern Russia, and last week the country’s Supreme Administrative Court upheld his political asylum.
In Russia Babenko, who was born in Lithuania, is accused of issuing loans worth 119 million rubles ($4.42 million) to two companies in league with their executives, who allegedly pocketed the money. Russian investigators estimated the value of other schemes involving the banker at 214 million rubles (about $8 million).
On October 18, a Lithuanian prosecutor released Babenko from custody on condition he not leave the country.
Babenko has dismissed the charges against him as political. His lawyer said earlier the banker is being prosecuted only because he headed an affiliate of the bank connected with imprisoned Yukos founder Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s inner circle.
But the Trust bank, formerly known as Menatep St. Petersburg, said the case is not politically motivated. Yekaterina Tolkunova, the bank’s marketing director, said earlier the case is “a felony, pure and simple.â€
An in-house probe into the missing loans has revealed that controversial local businessmen were behind the firms that received them, Tolkunova said.
Lithuanian authorities arrested Babenko in July 2005 after a Russian court issued an arrest warrant and put the banker and his associates on an international wanted list.
In September, a Vilnius district court ruled to extradite Babenko to Russia, saying Russian authorities had provided convincing evidence. But an appeals court in the Baltic state put the extradition order on hold pending an asylum ruling.
Meanwhile, prosecutors have searched the country house of a vice president of the bankrupt company, RIA Novosti adds.
“The search of [Mikhail] Shestopalov’s dacha was conducted October 18. Investigators did not find the two pistols he had been presented with while working in the Interior Ministry, but they confiscated other arms,†Boris Kuznetsov said.
He said Shestopalov was not in Russia, and that prosecutors broke into the house, prohibiting the vice president’s wife from entering.
Kuznetsov added that he has filed a complaint against investigators and has proposed handing over the pistols they failed to find, but the Prosecutor’s General Office refused to accept them.
He said the search was illegal and suggested that it was related to the case of Leonid Nevzlin, Yukos core shareholder, who is currently living in Israel and is on the international wanted list.
Nevzlin has been charged with fraud and involvement in a number of contract killings, and was put on the international wanted list July 21, 2004.
Israel has refused to extradite him to Russia.
The Prosecutor’s General Office has offered no comment on the search so far.
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October 24, 2006The mayor of the Russian city of Volgograd standing trial on fraud charges has told court he is stepping down, Itar-Tass reports.
Yevgeny Ishchenko made the statement before the beginning of another day of hearings on Monday.
In part, Ishchenko said he was reluctant “to make the people of the city hostages of the situation on the eve of the winter season.â€
“Perfectly aware that it was the people of Volgograd, who elected me mayor I am asking those whom I may have insulted, willfully or unwillfully, to forgive me. I made the decision to resign and to relieve myself of the Volgograd mayor’s duties consciously and of my own accord,†Ishchenko said.
The former mayor is facing charges under three articles of the criminal code — abuse of office, illegal business activity for the sake of personal selfish interests and illegal keeping of ammunition.
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Russian organized crime police confiscated documents from an environmental regulatory agency Wednesday, but denied the search was connected with the agency’s ongoing probes at a Royal Dutch Shell PLC-led development or other energy projects, AP reports.
Russian news agencies quoted the Interior Ministry’s organized crime department as saying that documents had been confiscated at Rosprirodnadzor in connection with an investigation into the Yuzhno-Tambeisk gas field, where state-controlled gas monopoly OAO Gazprom is in a dispute with a local company over licensing.
“Since Rosprirodnadzor issues the licenses to gas deposits, documents that formed the grounds for issuing the license were confiscated as part of a criminal case,†the Interfax news agency quoted a police spokesman as saying. “The main thing is that the inquiry is not being directed against Rosprirodnadzor itself.â€
Rosprirodnadzor’s deputy chief Oleg Mitvol told AP that officers were taking documents pertaining to business trips made by two of the agency’s employees.
“So far they are doing everything in line with the law,†he said.
Mitvol has overseen a series of high profile probes at Shell’s Sakhalin-2 liquefied natural gas project and fields held by OAO Lukoil and OAO Rosneft — Russia’s No. 1 and No. 3 oil producers respectively.
Environmental pressure at the Shell development has been interpreted by analysts as a drive to reshape the deal in the Kremlin’s favor, though Russian officials vehemently deny this.
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October 18, 2006Russian music download site allofmp3.com insisted it was a legitimate business and said U.S. accusations of piracy were merely an excuse to keep Russia out of the World Trade Organisation, AFP reports.
“The U.S. government is conveniently using allofmp3 as an issue to gain further concessions from Russia,†said company boss Vadim Mamotin and other executives.
“We operate under Russian law, we pay taxes in Russia and we pay royalties,†they said in response to journalists’ questions in an online news conference.
Russia has campaigned for 12 years to join the WTO but the United States is still withholding its endorsement of Moscow’s candidacy — it is the only major economy that has not yet backed Russia’s bid — citing shortcomings in several key trade sectors.
Moscow wants to join the organization both for the prestige of membership and as a means to spur diversification in its own economy, still focused heavily on raw materials export.
But U.S. negotiators have repeatedly returned to the issue of the worldwide music sales of allofmp3.com — protection of intellectual property being a major stumbling block in Russia’s negotiations to join the club.
U.S. Trade Representative Susan Schwab has placed allofmp3.com on a “notorious markets†list and in a speech last month she accused Russian authorities of allowing the website to operate with impunity.
The music site has a ready market outside Russia as well as at home, offering music tracks for as little as a third of a dollar and entire albums for two dollars, which compares with 99 US cents per track from iTunes.
The website’s executives denied Tuesday that the site had refused to pay royalties for its world-wide music sales.
They said the company had paid royalties to a Russian music society, the Russian Organization for Multimedia and digital Systems (ROMS), but the industry had refused to take such payments from the society.
“ROMS has offered to pay the record companies the royalties they collected but has been rebuffed… As we see it, the record companies really have an issue with ROMS and perhaps the Russian government,†they said.
They insisted the company would go from strength to strength, buoyed by the growth of the Internet, and that it was the record labels whose time was running out.
“They are concerned with making money for themselves not the artists. In our opinion, we and the artists are better off dealing directly with each other. In fact we believe it is the future of the music industry,†they said.
The owner of the website, Denis Kvasov, has been battling a lawsuit in a Moscow court by the international music industry body IFPI.
In a bid to allay U.S. concerns, Russia’s parliament gave preliminary approval last month to a strict new law on intellectual property rights that Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev said would bring Russian in line with Western demands.
But more widely, Russia’s negotiations to join the WTO have been hampered by Washington’s increasingly tough stance towards Moscow on the issue of Iran’s nuclear program.
Russia is the only major world economy not in the World Trade Organisation.
In Tuesday’s news conference the website’s executives refused to reveal details of the company’s finances.
The Kommersant daily estimated earlier the annual turn-over of allofmp3.com at between 25 million and 30 million dollars (20 million and 23 million euros)
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Russian police and financial intelligence service have uncovered a criminal community that laundered about $7 billion in 2004 and 2005, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported on Tuesday, quoting a release by the Interior Ministry’s Directorate for Fighting Economic Crime. .
The release said that the community, consisting of top managers of several banks and financial companies illegally converted into cash and transferred abroad over 390 million U.S. Dollars, 66 million Euros and over 200 billion Russian Rubles.
The Vek Bank and the Novaya Ekonomicheskaya Pozitsiya (New Economic Position) banks were mentioned in the release as the core of the illegal financial group.
Most of the funds were transferred abroad on the accounts of dummy organizations, RIA-Novosti quoted the release as saying.
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