Russian official reports sharp rise in losses from corruption-related crime

(Interfax – Moscow, November 27, 2013) Financial damage from corruption-related crimes increased more than sevenfold this year, Russian First Deputy Prosecutor-General Aleksandr Buksman has said.

“According to prosecutors’ files, the amount o financial damage in the [first] nine months of this year exceeded R10bn [about 330m dollars], a more than sevenfold increase,” Buksman said at a coordination meeting of heads of law-enforcement bodies on Wednesday [27 November].

Overall, he said, one in six corruption-related cases in the country is launched on the basis of prosecutors’ files.

Buksman said that the number of people charged with corruption had risen to 10,000 this year (from 8,000 a year earlier), and the number of corruption-related criminal cases sent to courts had risen by 20 per cent.

He also noted that the number of criminal cases of this type launched on the basis of prosecutors’ checks, including those by military prosecutors, had also risen, by 11 per cent.

Talking of corruption among law-enforcers, Buksman said that 800 law-enforcement staff had been convicted of crimes of this type since the start of the year, including over 500 police personnel, 143 bailiffs, 28 staff of the Russian Federal Drug Control Service, 26 customs officers, and six each from the prosecution service and the Russian Investigations Committee.

Noting that “these are impressive figures”, the first deputy prosecutor-general called for “internal security services of law-enforcement bodies to step up even more their work to unmask corrupt officials in their ranks”.

[Russian state news agency RIA Novosti quoted Buksman telling the meeting that “the number of exposed corruption-related crimes on a large and very large scale, or incurring very large losses, is still too low” and even decreasing. For crimes of these types committed by organized groups, only half as many were brought to light this year as last year, he said.

State-owned Russian news channel Rossiya 24 showed Buksman telling the meeting that the focus should be on “the sectors most susceptible to corruption”. These sectors, he said, were listed by President Vladimir Putin; they are: “the housing and communal services sector; the consumer market; the assessment of compensations in the aftermath of natural disasters; construction and repairs; and anticorruption protection of major infrastructure facilities”.]