Politics and rivalries hinder Investigative Committee

Kremlin and St. Basil's

(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan – January 21, 2013)

Alexander Bastrykin’s Investigative Committee – which just celebrated its second birthday – is flexing its muscles in a much-touched anti-corruption crusade.

But a look at its achievements in recent months suggests that while the body’s crime-fighting intentions may be sincere, Bastrykin’s caped crusaders are still far from Eliot Ness’ Untouchables. Bastrykin may indeed have emerged as President Vladimir Putin’s attack dog, but politics and clan rivalries constitute a retractable leash that can get pretty tight.

The Committee is on a roll with a spate of new raids and arrests – including last week’s detention of top defense official Nikolai Ryabykh – in its investigation into the Oboronservis commercial firm, allegedly used by suspected officials in the Defense Ministry in embezzlements that cost the government over 4 billion rubles.

Last fall, police raiding the apartment of former Defense Ministry employee Yevgenia Vasilyeva also found Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov there, wearing a bathrobe. The scandal cost Serdyukov his job.

Now, the Investigative Committee is scrutinizing Serdyukov’s entire stint as defense minister for evidence of potential violations that could be used to launch a separate criminal investigation against him, sources in the Investigative Committee were quoted as telling Kommersant earlier this month.

Serdyukov has refused to talk to investigators, something that has been widely interpreted as a sign that he’s counting on protection from above. Putin, confronted by journalists after his press conference in December, said that there was “nothing” to charge Serdyukov with, but vowed that there would be no leniency in the investigation as a whole.

Bastrykin too vows that this wouldn’t be just another case authorities would sweep under the rug. But can he be believed, given that Byzantine tangle of loyalties and rivalries often keep Russian authorities from doing their job?

Pavel Zaitsev, a former investigator who himself got caught up in a clan war when he investigated the Three Whales embezzlement scandal, sounded positive. “They’re really trying to fight corruption – but there’s no way you can rule out a clan war either,” he told The Moscow News.

“This is normal, at least in Russia, that the interests of certain groups are used by the government to fight corruption,” he said. “If these [rivalries] weren’t happening, we wouldn’t even know about these [crimes].”

Meanwhile, no case has been watched more closely than the investigation into the 2009 death of Hermitage Capital lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who was arrested after exposing an illegal tax scheme costing the government $230 million – a case that Bastrykin also initially vowed to crack. But geopolitics, experts say, has curbed Bastrykin’s enthusiasm.

“When we met in the past, [Bastrykin] was very keen on pursuing this case,” Valery Borshchev, a human rights advocate who led a presidential investigation into Magnitsky’s death, told The Moscow News.  “But now there is no more reaction.”

Ironically, the culprit is the Magnitsky Act passed by U.S. Congress last fall – issuing sanctions against Russian officials implicated in the Magnitsky affair.

“Thanks to the Magnitsky Act, if there was some work being done, then after the law was passed the attitude changed,” Kirill Kabanov, head of the National Anti-Corruption Committee, told The Moscow News. “Now it’s like this: we’re not going to listen to orders from the State Department.”

There were no “orders” to halt work on the Magnitsky affair, Kabanov said – instead, as often happens in Russia’s halls of power, the passage of the Magnitsky Act sent a signal for authorities to act in a certain way.

Bastrykin, meanwhile, is simply doing his job, according to Kabanov. Yet ultimately, it’s a job that’s entirely dependent on the will of the president.

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