President Dmitry Medvedev acknowledged Wednesday that his much-trumpeted campaign against corruption has yielded no palpable results and urged lawmakers to start conducting parliamentary investigations to fight the problem.
Parliamentary investigations are nearly a forgotten practice in Russia after all but vanishing under Vladimir Putin, who shifted sweeping powers to the executive branch during his eight-year presidency. The last serious attempt to conduct a parliamentary investigation into official corruption stalled after its initiator, Deputy Yury Shchekochikhin, died under murky circumstances in 2003.
Medvedev said he has not seen any "meaningful successes" since he declared war on corruption in spring 2009.
"It is obvious that no one is satisfied with how corruption is being fought — neither our citizens, who consider corruption to be one of our country's most serious problems and challenges, nor our officials, nor the corrupt individuals themselves," Medvedev said at a Kremlin meeting with the leaders of federal and regional legislatures.
Medvedev signed a presidential decree in March 2009 demanding that senior officials and their immediate family disclose their incomes and declare their property.
Subsequent initiatives by Medvedev have aimed to reform the Interior Ministry, restrict the powers of law enforcement officials investigating economic crimes, and bring transparency to the courts by obliging them to publicize case documents.
Still, Russia dangles humiliatingly low in international corruption indexes, with some analysts estimating that corruption amounts to the size of the country's gross domestic product. Corruption is also named in many surveys of businesspeople and ordinary Russians as the No. 1 threat and hindrance to Medvedev's pet project to modernize the country.
Analysts and opposition leaders blame Medvedev's visible failure on the fact that the anti-corruption effort has been entrusted to officials most likely involved in corruption schemes themselves.
None of Medvedev's anti-graft initiatives has empowered public groups, media, parliament or even prosecutors to exercise effective oversight over corrupt officials or provided them with tools to stop corrupt practices, other than, perhaps, complaining on Medvedev's personal blog, analysts said.
In a move that contradicts the Kremlin's parliamentary policies of the past several years, Medvedev on Wednesday called for more active parliamentary investigations.
"The institute of parliamentary investigations is not used as actively as it should be," Medvedev said.
He said it was not an instrument to resort to in ordinary cases but "it should bring in its share, be helpful in stopping corrupt actions."
The ruling United Russia party, which is led by Prime Minister Putin and enjoys an overwhelming majority in the State Duma, has repeatedly quashed attempts by other factions to initiate parliamentary investigations.
The most well-known parliamentary investigation into corruption focused on a smuggling scheme at the Tri Kita furniture store that implicated senior officials from the Prosecutor General's Office and the Federal Security Service. Its initiator, Shchekochikhin, a journalist who specialized in exposing corruption, died in July 2003 of what his colleagues at the opposition-minded Novaya Gazeta newspaper believe was poisoning. ?
Other examples of parliamentary investigations include an inquiry into the 2004 Beslan school attack and, more recently, the deadly accident last August at the Sayano-Shushenskaya power plant. The results of both investigations have raised more questions than answers about which officials were to blame for the high death tolls in both incidents.
Opposition calls to open parliamentary investigations into other major events, like the two wars in Chechnya, the 1998 default, the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine in 2000 and the Nord-Ost hostage drama in 2003, were ignored.
Medvedev on Wednesday once again called for the introduction of fines based on a multiple of the bribe taken as an alternative punishment to jail time.
"This should be a severe sentence measured in the millions, tens of millions and hundreds of millions of rubles," he said.
He added that he had been advised against the measure but still called on the State Duma and Federation Council to consider it.
The president also lamented poor statistics on corruption, saying the real number of cases is "dozens or hundreds" of times larger than reported.
In the meantime, he said, the number of reported cases grew by 10 percent last year to reach 43,000.
? "But this is all the tip of an iceberg," he said.
The Duma will soon receive a bill that sets a flat fine of 500,000 rubles ($16,400) for a single case of bribe-taking of up to 3,000 rubles ($100) and a work ban of three to 10 years for the official caught taking the bribe, said the bill's author, United Russia Deputy Vladimir Gruzdev, Interfax reported.
Viktor Ilyukhin, a senior Communist lawmaker in the Duma and a top prosecutor in Soviet times, said the problem with Medvedev's anti-corruption drive was an abundance of creative ideas paired with a failure to really fight corruption in the top levels of government.
In Soviet times, he said, officials at all levels of government had to explain in detail the sources of their wealth, and their statements were checked thoroughly.
"There is no such practice now," he said.
Medvedev's initiative of income declarations has made it obligatory for officials to declare their incomes but does not specify penalties for non-compliance or reporting false figures. The fact-checking procedure for the declarations remains vague.
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