Business Watch
Corruption (18)
Senior executives from the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) yesterday made clear in London they wanted informers to spill the beans on employers and business rivals and that they had a clear mandate to follow the money if even part of it ended up in the UK.
Six months after the UK Bribery Act came into force, Paul Brinkworth, a Deputy Head of Bribery and Corruption at the SFO and Jane de Lozey, Joint Head of Fraud addressed a group of over 100 executives from British firms doing business with Russia to beware, as they were ramping up operations in cooperation with other enforcement agencies worldwide.
By Gordon Hahn
This commentary originally appeared on Russia: Other Points of View blog
Despite claims that nothing is changing in Russia and, more specifically, that Russian president Dmitry Medvedev’s anti-corruption drive is going nowhere, the fact is that the campaign is picking up steam and has a chance of making a real dent in Russia’s massive, endemic corruption. Let’s begin with the least impressive but by no means insignificant of the recent steps. In his May press conference at Skolkovo Medvedev called for a relaxation of the technical inspection of automobiles during the registration process; something that would reduce GIBDD presonnel’s opportunities for demanding bribes. By the end of the month, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin had prepared a government resolution waiving the requirement for new automobiles to be inspected upon their initial registration or during their first year on the road (Aleksandra Smarina, “Voyazh Medvedeva na ammita utonul v potoke informatsi o Putine,” Nezavisimaya gazeta, 27 May 2011). This deprives the auto inspection department of a key opportunity for soliciting bribes; another step in Medvedev’s anti-corruption drive.
By Eric Krause
We have repeatedly thought we had spoken our last of the Yukos story, and that – like for the Orange
Revolution, or the Georgian invasion of So. Ossetia – the world had begrudgingly come around to a
more realistic assessment of the events. This was, of course, to neglect the huge power of PR in our
world – money still cannot buy your happiness, but it can, apparently, buy you “Truth”!
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin asked the business community on Monday to report any problems related to "the unscrupulousness of Moscow city government officials."
Russia's Interior Ministry has insisted that whistleblower lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, whose mysterious death last November has triggered an international row, was behind a $175 million scam. Magnitsky, who was defending UK investment company Hermitage Capital Management against tax evasion charges, died aged 37 in a Moscow prison last November after being refused medical treatment for pancreatitis.
Alexandedr Lebedev the Russian billionaire owner of London's Evening Standard and the Independent group of newspapers claimed the police raid on his bank in Moscow Monday was a "masky show" ordered by a rival to scare clients away from the National Reserve Bank.
Several dozen armed men in masks were reported to enter earlier on Monday the 11-storey building in southwest Moscow, which along with the National Reserve Bank also hosts the office of the Russian state-run hi-tech corporation Rosnano and several other organizations.