Zee Beam News

07.11.2006 MosNews - Corrupt 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. Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman told the Rossiiskaya Gazeta that prosecutors had uncovered over 9,000 cases of bribery in the first eight months of the year. His comments marked the first time a senior Russian official had publicly put a monetary figure on the problem of corruption in Russia, which has flourished since Czarist times but has markedly increased in recent years under President Vladimir Putin. Putin, a former KGB colonel, was elected in 2000 promising to set Russia on the path to modernization and impose a “dictatorship of the law” to eliminate graft. But anti-corruption campaigners say the state-driven assault launched in mid-2003 against now jailed billionaire tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his Yukos oil giant gave bureaucrats at all levels of government a green light to extort money from businesses. The global anti-corruption group Transparency International and Russia’s business-funded National Anti-Corruption Committee last year estimated that the level of graft had jumped as much as sevenfold since 2001. Russia is near the top of Transparency International’s scale of corruption, at No. 121 out of 163 in 2006, along with such countries as Rwanda and Burundi. Four years ago, it had been rated 71. On that scale, the least corrupt is Finland, while Haiti and Myanmar occupy the top two places. The prosecutor said that Putin had ordered him to take charge of a new anti-corruption task force after the apparent contract killing of Central Bank First Deputy Chairman Andrei Kozlov on Sept. 13. Kozlov was shot in the head as he left a soccer game between bank employees in Moscow and his murder is widely believed to be connected to his campaign against money-laundering and criminality in the banking sector. Buksman complained of a lack of cooperation between law enforcement bodies in combatting money-laundering and other economic crimes and conceded that so far only lower-ranking officials were being prosecuted for corruption. In one case, the deputy head of the state property fund’s subsidiary in the southern region of Krasnodar is accused of pocketing US$410,000 (euro323,000) in bribes, said Buksman. A study published in September 2005 by the respected Indem Institute concluded that bribes paid by businesses to police, licensing bodies and state inspectors had soared by nearly 10 times between 2001 and 2005 to US$316 billion (euro249 billion). Indem head Georgy Satarov said that the government’s decision to shine a spotlight on its anti-corruption efforts appeared to be aimed at voters ahead of national parliamentary elections next year and the 2008 presidential vote. But he said that the gradual erosion of democratic checks and balances that has taken place under Putin the squeezing of opposition parties, the independent media and civil society made it impossible to rein in greedy Russian bureaucrats. “An essential condition for fighting corruption is to have the means to control the bureaucracy,” Satarov told The Associated Press, alleging that there was no rule of law in Putin’s Russia.