The presidential council to fight corruption has developed a new national strategy for fighting corruption and a revised draft plan on the matter, the council's head, Kremlin chief of staff Sergei Naryshkin, told President Dmitry Medvedev on Tuesday.
Medvedev approved the plan to introduce a "multiplier fine" for bribe-takers, which he said would be easier to make law than property confiscations. In addition, a fine based on the size of the bribe will be particularly discouraging for offending officials, Medvedev said.
The strategy meets Russia's international obligations, including to GRECO, the Council of Europe's anti-corruption body. Russia is slated to report on how it is fulfilling the body's recommendations in June.
The strategy's priority is to eliminate the reasons for corruption in Russia society, as well as to prevent such crimes among officials and to punish those who have already committed them, Naryshkin said.
The plan, which was most recently approved by the presidential council in June 2008, will be revised every two years, he said.
The new version envisions greater public oversight of how budgets are formed at all levels of government. It also includes large-scale sociological research to determine the effectiveness of the state's anti-corruption drive and attitudes about corruption in the regions and in Russia as a whole.
Other elements of the plan include improving how legal entities are created, operated and liquidated; monitoring the work of self-regulating organizations; and modernizing the corporate legal system.
Results of the two-year fight against bribe-takers were discussed at Tuesday's hearing.
It was noted that legislation is now being actively checked for factors that could allow corruption, with 48,000 legal documents out of some 800,000 checked last year having been flagged.
In 2009, 13,000 criminal cases were opened against corrupt officials, or 5 percent more than a year earlier.
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