Press Release, 27.01.2017

YABLOKO’s Anti-Corruption Centre, headed by Sergei Mitrokhin, member of YABLOKO’s Political Committee, released a survey on the situation with corruption in Russia in 2016 http://www.yabloko.ru/2017/01/27. It analyses the cases of 2016 that got loud the profile cases last year, legislation, law enforcement practices and the authorities’ response to civil investigations.

The Anti-Corruption Centre concluded that there was no anti-corruption system in Russia in 2016. Resignations and investigations against officials were held by the state without any coherent policy. According to YABLOKO, snowballing publications on corruption in the state-owned mass media represented propaganda and demonstrative purges in the bureaucracy. However, resonance investigations conducted by independent journalists and non-governmental organisations, as a rule, did not receive proper evaluation from the law enforcement.

Thus, the statistics of the Prosecutor’s Office demonstrated that only 20 per cent of the publications on corruption in the media made in 2015 through to June 2016 were recognized “substantiated”. However, the figure they gave was mentioned as “approximate”.

According to the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, 91.1 per cent of those convicted in 2015 for the crimes connected with corruption were convicted for giving or taking bribes up to 50,000 roubles. And there has been not updating of the data yet, however, according to the Anti-Corruption Centre expects, that the situation did not change significantly in 2016.

At least six out of 24 large-scale cases of corruption compiled by Transparency International-Russia in 2016, were initiated by independent mass media and non-governmental organisations, but none of these cases, including that of Kirill Shamalov, Vladimir Putin’s alleged son-in-law received adequate attention from the law enforcement.

Sergei Mitrokhin writes about these and other cases in his blog. http://www.yabloko.ru/blog/2017/01/27