Corruption clearly harms the state, robbing it of a significant part of economic growth and preventing it from achieving a decent standard of living for every citizen. At the same time, no one has yet succeeded in eradicating it, but there are countries that have achieved serious success in this. Alas, Russia is not one of them - despite high-profile corruption cases and serious responsibility for corruption. We figured out who is punished for bribes and how, and why corrupt officials are most often punished.
Bribe and violation of anti-corruption laws - what is the difference?
Stories of high-profile cases of bribery or bribery can be regularly seen and heard in the Russian media. Usually these are stories about how a certain citizen bribed an official so that he would simply do his job (or do it differently than he should). Slightly more rare cases are about the reckless actions of citizens who decided to bribe a policeman, customs officer or some other official, who suddenly remembered their duties and did not take the money (at the same time reporting where they should be about the attempt to bribe them).
However, hundreds of thousands of registered, and sometimes even investigated, violations of anti-corruption legislation go unnoticed. And, although many do not see the difference, a bribe is not a violation of anti-corruption laws
. To understand this, you need to learn a little more about the essence of corruption.
In a general sense, corruption means that an official uses his authority to obtain personal gain, all of which is contrary to legal norms.
That is, corruption is when there is always an official, and this person uses his official position to gain benefits.
In the public consciousness, corruption is closely related to bribery. The Russian Criminal Code identifies 3 types of crimes related to bribes:
- receiving a bribe - an official receives certain advantages or benefits for his actions or inactions (legal or illegal);
- giving a bribe - an official is persuaded to perform certain actions in favor of the bribe giver, for which he is offered a reward;
- mediation in bribery - the direct transfer of a bribe from the one who gives it to the one who takes it, or facilitating bribery in another form.
Each of these crimes has its own article of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, and punishment is imposed - from a fine and a ban on holding certain positions to actual terms of imprisonment.
A bribe is not necessarily money
, these could be other valuable and not so valuable items, even food. This does not have to be a specific item - a bribe can be a service (repair, treatment, recreation, entertainment).
There is also a veiled form of a bribe, when an official receives some goods or services at a reduced price, “accidentally” wins a lottery, receives a (non-repayable) loan, or receives some other special conditions.
All this implies criminal liability
, that is, bribery is a crime. But this is not the only thing connected with corruption. For example, in 2022, 12 thousand people were convicted of corruption crimes, and just over 30 thousand such crimes were registered.
But in the same year, 231 thousand violations of anti-corruption legislation were identified, and these are completely different offenses. This is due to the fact that the state is actively fighting (or at least trying to fight)
with corruption). For this purpose, in Russia there is Federal Law No. 273-FZ of December 25, 2008 “On Combating Corruption.” It can be described as measures aimed at preventing corruption. These are, for example, various kinds of restrictions and additional requirements for officials, rules for preventing conflicts of interest, rules for declaring income by civil servants, and much more.
fines amounting to almost a billion rubles were issued in 2022
. That is, for every person convicted of a bribe or other “corruption” crime, there are approximately 30 persons who were punished under the Code of Administrative Offenses for violating anti-corruption legislation.
By the way, the question “why do those who are suspected of violating anti-corruption laws end up remaining free?” occurs quite often, as citizens simply do not see the difference
between criminal liability for corruption and administrative liability for violation of the rules to combat it.
The Rosagroleasing case
In 2011-2013, the Ministry of Internal Affairs opened three criminal cases of theft of budget funds at OJSC Rosagroleasing, which occurred in 2007-2009. Former Deputy Minister of Agriculture of the Russian Federation Aleksey Bazhanov, general director of Mezhregiontorg LLC Sergey Burdovsky, general director of Lipetskagrotekhservice LLC Igor Konyakhin, former managers of Masloproduct-Bio CJSC Roman Malov and Sergey Dudenkov were arrested.
The investigation estimated the total damage from their criminal activities at 39 billion rubles. Former head of the Ministry of Agriculture department Oleg Donskikh has been put on the wanted list for the theft of 600 million rubles. Former head of the Ministry of Agriculture Elena Skrynnik (headed Rosagroleasing in 2001-2009) was interrogated as a witness and subsequently left Russia. In October 2015, it became known that in the spring of 2013, the Office of the Federal Prosecutor (UFP) of Switzerland initiated criminal proceedings against Skrynnik and a number of other persons on suspicion of money laundering; In this context, the FPO seized bank accounts belonging to the former Minister of Agriculture. On October 28, 2015, Russian media reported the seizure of Skrynnik’s Swiss accounts in the amount of 60 million francs (about $61 million).
On October 29, Secretary of the General Council of the United Russia political party Sergei Neverov said that Skrynnik was expelled from the party for actions discrediting this political organization, as well as “for losing contact with the party.” On November 2, the head of the Russian Presidential Administration, Sergei Ivanov, said that the Swiss prosecutor’s office has no complaints against Elena Skrynnik, and all “significant claims” relate to her former deputy. Skrynnik herself, speaking on the Russian News Service, stated that the information about the seizure of her accounts in Switzerland is not true, emphasizing that she “doesn’t even have that kind of money.”
The most common corruption crimes
The most high-profile cases, like the Oboronservis case
(theft in the Ministry of Defense, due to which Minister Anatoly Serdyukov lost his position), the case of the Governor of the Sakhalin Region
Alexander Khoroshavin
, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for a bribe of 5.6 million dollars, the case of the Governor of Komi
Vyacheslav Gaizer
(damage of 1.1 billion rubles, received 11 years in prison), the case of the Governor of the Kirov Region
Nikita Belykh
(a bribe of 400 thousand euros, received 8 years), the case of the Minister of Economy
Alexei Ulyukaev
(extorted 2 million dollars, received 8 years), etc.
However, statistics of court cases show that such high-profile cases with large sums are rather rare. According to statistics for 2017, about half of all those convicted of corruption crimes (2,500 out of 5,400 people) were charged under Article 291.2 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation - “Petty bribery”
(introduced in 2016), this is a punishment for bribe amounts up to 10 thousand rubles. The maximum penalty under this article is a fine of 200 thousand rubles or imprisonment for up to 1 year.
But there is another interesting trend - the composition of the convicts. More than a third of convictions were against “able-bodied persons without a specific occupation.”
To put it simply, every third person convicted is an unemployed person who tried to give a bribe
to an official (because the official has a certain occupation).
In fact, these are “unofficial” taxi drivers (who do not register as individual entrepreneurs and do not work for a taxi service), who pay bribes to traffic police inspectors, drug users (who are often encouraged to offer a bribe and are detained on 2 charges at once), as well as “marginalized” layers societies that, when in contact with law enforcement officers, try to pay them off with money
.
Accordingly, every third person convicted of bribery in Russia probably falls into one of these categories, and half of all those convicted were caught with small amounts. At the same time, only about 10% of those convicted are law enforcement officers. These data provide a fairly objective assessment of how Russian justice works in corruption cases.
There are quite a lot of such cases in the judicial practice of lawyers. lawyer Boris Nosov says
, a trivial matter - a policeman asks for a certain amount to “hush up” charges (in this case, drug distribution):
Reports about detected corruption crimes and, although less frequently, about the punishment imposed for them, are firmly established in today's information agenda. Moreover, more often than one would expect, given the peculiarities of appointment to responsible positions, high-ranking representatives of law enforcement agencies and the leadership of entire regions find themselves at the center of high-profile scandals. The scale of the criminal activities of such officials seems to hint to us that there is money in the country and there is a lot of it, but they work in the shadow economy and not for the country.
Power is a great responsibility and test. How do lower-level officials with authority deal with it? Statistics show that corruption is a cross-cutting and almost universal phenomenon. You can also see that it also happens that those who are called upon to fight corruption are themselves affected by it and involve others in criminal activities. Moreover, there are cases where such employees fabricate charges against innocent citizens.
The first case, the scenario of which is repeated time after time on television, turned out to be trivial. After a search of a potential drug distributor, he was taken to the department along with the seized substances, where he refused to give any testimony.
The next day, the detainee was taken to the police officer’s office, where the employee offered to help avoid criminal liability for a reward of 200 thousand rubles, which he later received using a lawyer as an intermediary.
Everything ended logically: the policeman was sentenced to imprisonment for a term of 7 years and 6 months to be served in a maximum security correctional colony, a fine of 4 million rubles, and was also banned from holding positions in internal affairs bodies for 5 years. The lawyer-intermediary, in turn, was imprisoned for 5 years, fined 4 million rubles and deprived of the right to practice law for 4 years.
Boris Nosov , lawyer at Precedent Consulting.
Considering that every 10th person convicted on “corruption” charges is a law enforcement officer
, this is the most dangerous job for people prone to unearned income.
But everyday corruption happens almost everywhere. And if insurance medicine is gradually eliminating corruption in healthcare, then, for example, in education it still remains. There are almost no opportunities in preschool education (queues for kindergartens are electronic), and in schools it is not customary to pay for grades, but it has turned out to be almost impossible to eradicate corruption from higher education.
As lawyer Rodion Zheleznov
(who is also a teacher), a typical case looks like this:
In my opinion, as a practicing lawyer, as well as a university teacher, one of the most interesting cases is the case in the Leninsky District Court of Orenburg (Orenburg Region) - Case No. 1-531/2019. In this verdict, the convicted person was a university student who bribed an official personally 4 times for committing obviously illegal actions (inaction).
Thus, the convict was a 3rd year student of group N of the correspondence faculty ... in the educational program, direction and specialty "Pedagogical Education" with a major in "History", where she was enrolled by order of the rector ... from ... N, knowing about the upcoming intermediate certification (study session) for 5 th semester, which was supposed to take place from January 12, 2015 to February 3, 2015, in the form of exams and tests conducted after students completed all types of classes planned for the semester, but did not want to do this on their own and come to the session in Orenburg, in the absence of a good reason, formed a criminal intent to give a bribe in the form of money, full name, as an official, for the opportunity to transfer to the next year and not be expelled due to academic debt based on the results of the intermediate certification for the 5th semester of the 3rd year 2014/2015 academic year, as well as for putting marks (grades) in the grade book and examination and grade sheets in the disciplines prescribed for passing during this intermediate certification, without actually passing them.
In order to implement her criminal intent, the student, in the period from January 15, 2015 to January 20, 2015, while in the full name’s office in the premises ... at the address: ... turned to him with a request to assist in resolving the issue of putting marks (grades) in the test a book and examination and grade sheets for the disciplines prescribed for passing during the intermediate certification for the 5th semester of the 3rd year of the 2014/2015 academic year, without actually passing them, that is, without actually conducting an assessment of the current control of her knowledge.
Further, the full name invited her to give him a bribe in the form of money in the amount of 20,000 rubles for committing the above illegal actions in her favor.
After which, Dusinyazova D.E., implementing her plan, acting illegally, intentionally, realizing the social danger of her actions, foreseeing the inevitability of socially dangerous consequences in the form of a violation of the established order of the educational process in a state educational institution of higher education, and wishing for their occurrence, personally transferred in the period from ... to ... being an official, full name, a bribe in the form of money in the total amount of 20,000 rubles, while being in the period from 09:00 to 18:00 in his office in the premises ... at the address: ....
Further, having personally received a bribe in the form of money in the amount of 20,000 rubles, acting illegally, deliberately, for selfish reasons, Full Name committed illegal actions in favor of this student, namely, using his official position, he organized the publication of order No. dated July 27, 2015 on translation by Dusinyazova D.E. to the next 4th year with ..., as a student who has fully completed the curriculum for the educational program, direction and specialty “Pedagogical Education” in the “History” profile, that is, without academic debt in the subjects of intermediate certification for the 5th semester of the 3rd course of the 2014/2015 academic year, which Dusinyazova D.E. actually did not hand over, giving Dusinyazova D.E. the right to continue studying in the future and not be expelled from...
In this simple way, the student reached the 4th year, giving a total of 4 bribes - for each semester.
The student was caught after one of the teachers did not agree with these actions and wrote a complaint. After which, during her arrest, she was charged with Part 3 of Art. 291 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation. Which the court upheld. As a defense, an indication of mitigating circumstances was used: the presence of young children with the perpetrator; active contribution to the detection and investigation of crimes, expressed in her confession. As a result, the court found her guilty and imposed a fine of 160,000 rubles. In addition, taking into account her property status, the court ordered an installment plan of 10 months at 16 thousand rubles per month.
Rodion Zheleznov , managing partner of Interregional Legal (Kazan).
In this case, the bribe-taker was not a teacher, but a certain official who is responsible for filling out forms and transferring students from course to course (the position of the dean of the faculty fits the description). This story, unfortunately, is very common - in some universities, students say among themselves that there are well-known “prices” for “closing” the session with normal grades
and transfer to the next semester.
Considering that usually the amounts of such bribes are not particularly large (especially if the teacher takes the money), and the accused are usually given good characteristics, they almost always get off with fines and a ban on holding certain positions
some period of time.
In general, information about such cases rarely gets into the media - there are many of them, they are not particularly different from one another and are not very interesting to the public. Moreover, there are much more interesting precedents.
The case of Alexey Kuznetsov
On June 24, 2010, the Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation issued a resolution to bring in the former Minister of Finance of the Moscow Region, Alexey Kuznetsov, as accused of fraud committed by an organized group on a particularly large scale, and the legalization of property obtained illegally. According to the investigation, as a result of the actions of the criminal group, which included Kuznetsov, the government of the Moscow region and regional housing and communal services enterprises suffered damage amounting to over 10 billion rubles.
On July 5, 2013, Kuznetsov was detained at the request of Russian law enforcement agencies in the resort of St. Tropez on the Cote d'Azur in France. In December 2014, the Basmanny Court of Moscow sentenced the former Deputy Minister of Finance of the Moscow Region Valery Nosov to 14 years in prison and a fine of 1 million rubles in the same criminal case (on November 9, 2015, the Khamovnichesky Court of Moscow will consider a new criminal case against him); the former general director of the Moscow Regional Trust Nes-Finance Elena Kuznetsova - to 10 and 7 years in prison, respectively.
In 2014, the French Lyon Court of Appeal granted the request of the Russian Prosecutor General's Office to extradite Kuznetsov to Russia. In accordance with French legislation, the final decision on the issue of extradition of the ex-Minister of Finance of the Moscow Region will be made by the state executive authorities.
The most unusual cases of corruption
As for the most unusual cases, the subject of the bribe is almost always of interest. The Criminal Code defines that this item can be anything that has a certain value. For example, about 10 years ago, some officials were not against receiving a bribe with vouchers to pay for cellular communications (almost money, there is even a face value). Now, of course, they demand money more often, but unusual situations do happen.
Everyday life is a complex matter, and sometimes some everyday things become the subject of a bribe, for example:
- in Kalmykia, a conscript tried to bribe the military commissar with a lamb carcass
; - in the Sverdlovsk region, a traffic police officer, instead of drawing up a report, demanded that the driver (a construction company employee) replace the battery in his house
; - in the Rostov region, a local administration official issued fictitious certificates in exchange for printer cartridges
(probably to print the same certificates); - in the Tyumen region, a teacher demanded money from students, but for a reason: he offered to buy all sorts of unnecessary things from him,
like a typewriter or a cassette recorder; - An official of the Federal Migration Service in the Trans-Baikal Territory agreed not to hold an entrepreneur accountable for hiring a foreigner in exchange for 100 railway sleepers
.
One Ukrainian deputy recently suggested that a resident of the country sell her dog to pay for utilities. In Russia, animals often become the subject of bribes.
There are cases of attempts to bribe with puppies
, sheep, geese and even hamsters. As a rule, animals are “listed” in rural areas.
They even give bribes with food. And if chocolate or cognac looks more or less clear, then how it was possible to offer a year of free lunches in the canteen for a traffic police inspector is no longer so obvious. True, they say that in rural areas there are attempts to give a bribe with home canning
.
In general, they try to “thank” the right person with almost anything - fireworks, bales of hay, a bag of rat poison, books in Esperanto, dried orange peels and much more.
Lawyer Boris Nosov
talks about two more unusual cases from judicial practice:
This case is interesting because of its outcome. The operatives and then the investigator did everything to accuse the university rector of receiving a bribe using his official position. The amount is not small - 7 million rubles. It is important to understand that out of more than 50 corruption articles in the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation, only some of them are taken into account as unconditionally corrupt. For others, it is necessary to prove corrupt or selfish motives and the fact of the official’s participation.
In the case with the rector, the necessary evidence base and, as a consequence, the elements of a selfish crime were missing. The court of first instance, and then the court of appeal, agreed with the defense, preserving the freedom and good name of the rector.
This case struck not so much with the elements of a corruption crime, but with the exotic subject of the bribe itself.
In the Ivanovo region, the head of a budgetary organization, acting in the interests of a legal entity, in order to impose a more lenient punishment and reduce the amount of the alleged administrative fine for an offense, accepted a bribe in the form of chopped birch firewood.
Chopped firewood cost the head of a budget organization a fine of 200 thousand rubles, and the director of a legal entity a fine of 250 thousand rubles. Moreover, the legal entity was also fined - 500 thousand rubles. The question naturally arises: was the alleged fine for which the bribe was given worth 750 thousand rubles?
The answer most likely lies in the need to change our understanding of acceptable behavior at the level of cultural code.
Boris Nosov , lawyer at Precedent Consulting.
And the main thing is all the revealed facts of bribery
(albeit such a funny one). No one knows how many similar facts of everyday and other corruption remain secret, as well as what can be given as bribes.
The GLONASS case
In April 2012, the former head of Roscosmos, Vladimir Popovkin, reported that facts of money laundering allocated for the development of the GLONASS system had been identified at Russian Space Systems OJSC. In July of the same year, the Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a case against “unidentified persons” in the management of the company and structures close to it for the misuse of 565 million rubles. In November 2012, the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced the theft of 6.5 billion rubles during the development of GLONASS. GLONASS General Designer Yuri Urlichich lost his post.
In 2013, new facts of fraud were revealed - 387.5 million rubles, transferred to fictitious subcontractors (former head Igor Grushelevsky was named among the suspects), and 107 million rubles, stolen during the construction of GLONASS facilities. In the second case, the amount of damage later increased to 250 million rubles; in April 2015, the case was brought to court.
The accused are former deputy general director of FSUE TsNIIMash George Kovkov, head of the capital construction department of the same organization Alexander Chernov, ex-general director of department No. 5 at Spetsstroy Alexander Belov, owner Dmitry Belitsky and general director of SpetsMonolit LLC Roman Martynenko.
Alexander Reimer case
On March 31, 2015, the Presnensky Court of Moscow authorized the arrest of the former head of the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN), Alexander Reimer, on charges of fraud. According to investigators, the former official was involved in the theft of 2.7 billion rubles by inflating purchase prices when purchasing electronic bracelets for the department to control prisoners.
General Director Nikolai Martynov, former deputy head of the Federal Penitentiary Service Nikolai Krivolapov, and director of the Center for Information Support and Communications of the Federal Penitentiary Service Viktor Oderenov are also involved in this case.
All of them are accused of fraud on an especially large scale; each faces up to 10 years in prison with a fine of up to 1 million rubles. On September 24, 2015, Reimer was charged with abuse of power; his arrest was extended until January 31, 2016.
The case of “Resorts of the North Caucasus”
In the spring of 2013, the Ministry of Internal Affairs conducted an inspection of the management organization of North Caucasus Resorts OJSC. As a result, facts of abuse by management and misuse of funds in the amount of about 275.3 million rubles were revealed.
The Ministry of Internal Affairs opened a criminal case under Part 4 of Art. 159 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Fraud”) in relation to the company’s managers. In addition, a criminal case was opened against the general director of the company, Akhmed Bilalov, under Art. 201 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“Abuse of Power”) - he was suspected of illegally paying for foreign business trips in the amount of more than 3 million rubles.
Akhmed Bilalov's brother Magomed was accused in absentia of abuse of 1 billion rubles worth of Sberbank of the Russian Federation funds allocated for Olympic venues. Both brothers fled abroad.
