Rate of theft by Russian officials reaches more than $7 million per day
The total damage in the corruption cases concluded in the first eight months of 2019 in Russia is approximately 102 billion rubles, around $1.6 billion at current exchange rates.
These figures were cited on Monday by Dmitry Sevastyanov, deputy head of the division for combating the misuse of budget funds at Russia’s Chief Directorate for Economic Security and Opposing Corruption, Kommersant reports.
The average rate at which money leaked from the budget on various levels was thus around $200 million per month, $7.45 million per day, and about $266,000 per hour.
The total damage from these corruption crimes in eight months was almost the same as the entire annual budget of Russia’s Voronezh province ($1.77 billion), twice as much as the annual budgets of provinces such as Bryansk and Vladimir ($910 million), and nearly 10 times the budget of the Kalmyk and Jewish Autonomous Oblasts ($172 and $149 million respectively).
The government has been able to recover only a quarter of the corruption damages, $423 million out of $1.6 billion, Sevastyanov noted.
Roughly a thousand officials have been convicted, he said, and $23.5 million worth of property has been confiscated from them.
The number of corruption crimes has grown by 4.7%. Between January and August, 18,400 corruption crimes were identified, of them 5,500 on a large or particularly large scale.
More than 15,000 crimes were investigated: 1,600 were committed by a group of persons according to a prior collusion, and 632 by organized criminal groups, the Interior Ministry’s statistics indicate.