International Herald Tribune

Reports: Russian fisheries officials convicted of taking US$3.7-million bribe

The Associated Press Thursday, February 15, 2007

MOSCOW: A Russian court on Thursday convicted a former fisheries official on charges of taking a US$3.7 million (€2.8 million) bribe, news reports said.

Alexander Tugushev, a former deputy head of the State Committee for Fisheries, was sentenced to six years in prison by a Moscow court, the ITAR-Tass, Interfax and RIA-Novosti news agencies reported.

Prosecutors said Tugushev accepted the bribe from a businessman in Russia's far eastern Khabarovsk region in exchange for a promise to allocate fishing quotas to his company.

Two other officials and a businessman, who prosecutors claimed were Tugushev's accomplices, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from 5 to 5 1/2 years for fraud, the reports said.

Though President Vladimir Putin has made fighting corruption a major goal, experts say the problem has worsened at all government levels since he came to power in 2000. The global anti-corruption group Transparency International estimates that the level of graft has jumped as much as sevenfold since 2001.

Corrupt Russian officials are estimated to take bribes of US$240 billion (€183 billion) a year, an amount almost equal to the state's entire revenue, a senior prosecutor said earlier this month.

Overview: The Khabarovsk Krai is located in the center of the Russian Far East. Land, marine and air routes pass through its territory connecting the interior parts of the country with the Pacific ports, as well as the ‘IS and Western Europe countries with the Asian Pacific Rim countries.