Fleeing Official Flings $320,000 From Car Window

A Federal Fisheries Agency official tossed 10 million rubles ($320,000) out his car window on a busy Moscow street in a desperate attempt to avoid bribery charges during a failed car chase, investigators said.

Police scrambled to pick up the banknotes, but about 1 million rubles were reported missing, a news report said.

The incident occurred immediately after Boris Simonov, a deputy department head with the agency's branch for the Moscow and Oka rivers, received the money Thursday, the Investigative Committee said in a statement.

Simonov and his boss, department head Roman Postnikov, were under surveillance by the Federal Security Service and were detained after Simonov received the money, the statement posted on the committee's web site said Friday.

Postnikov was nabbed in a separate operation in the Moscow region as he was handing over official documents and a forged contract to the head of Lucia Plus, a Moscow region fishing enterprise that was found to lack the required operational permits during an inspection by the Federal Fisheries Agency, the statement said.

Simonov tried to flee police officers in his Cadillac SUV but crashed into another vehicle because he was distracted by throwing money out the window, not knowing that all the banknotes were marked by the FSB, it said.

Official FSB footage shown on Channel One on Friday evening news showed banknotes scattered over a central lane of the broad Varshavskoye Shosse in southern Moscow.

Two men, one of them presumably Simonov, are seen sitting in the lane on the pavement next to a large silver SUV, while plainclothes officers wearing rubber gloves are busy collecting the cash.

Police blocked the street for about half an hour during the incident, leaving a single lane open for traffic, Valery Buzovkin, spokesman for the city's southern administrative district police, told The Moscow Times.

But 1 million rubles ($32,000) of scattered money actually went missing, possibly collected by passing motorists, Kommersant reported Saturday.

A criminal case has been opened against Simonov and Postnikov, who face prison sentences of up to 12 years if convicted of large-scale bribery.

"They proposed to abort the inspection [of the fishing company] for a payment of 10 million rubles," the Investigative Committee said.

Government inspections ranging from police to health or fire safety agencies are widely seen as a means to extort bribes. Companies frequently employ so-called permit managers whose primary function is to manage the payment of such bribes.

President Dmitry Medvedev has made the fight against bribery and other forms of corruption a hallmark of his two-year presidency, and Thursday's incident suggests that it is bearing fruit. Anti-corruption experts, however, say the problem is so deeply imbedded that Medvedev faces a formidable challenge.

The Federal Fisheries Agency said the two officials had been suspected of bribery for the past six months.

"We informed the law enforcement agencies about it, which finally resulted in that exciting adventure," agency spokesman Alexander Savelyev told Kommersant.

The case is not the first to involve the agency, which manages the country's lucrative fishing quotas. In April, Igor Bakulin, an aide to agency director Andrei Krainy, was charged with accepting a $250,000 bribe for salmon fishing permits in the Pacific Ocean.

The Investigative Committee issued a stern warning Friday to the fisheries agency, saying that "if the authorities do not take serious steps to fight corruption, such crimes could become systemic."

"We're going to cauterize this evil with a red-hot iron," agency spokesman Savelyev said, Interfax reported.