Corruption Blast

Today has not been a good day for the respectability of Russia’s organizations.  Firstly we have the weekend’s  police corruption You Tube video, whose revelations about alleged case fabrications and all manner of other dishonest practices have put quite a dampener on Police Day.  Secondly, it has been announced today that 22 criminal cases have been opened into ‘ineffective sending of state funds’ among state-run enterprises.  Thirdly, we have Alexander Morozenko, the mayor of Korolyov, who has been put under investigation for misuses of state funding.  Two Moscow region officials have also been charged with embezzling more than $105 million from the local budget as part of an extortion ruse engineered by the area’s ex-chief financial official, Alexei Kuznetsov, who is now on the run, with an arrest warrant hanging over his head.  President Medvedev referred to the country’s ‘endemic corruption’ in his ‘Go Russia’ speech, in a surprising act of preemptive auto-criticism, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.  However acknowledging the problem, and actually doing something about it, remain two very different things.