About 8,000 Russian officials came under prosecution in the first half of 2010 for suspected corruption, a senior police official said on a television program on Wednesday.
"All law enforcement services exposed 28,000 corruption crimes [for the first half of the year]. Talking about those who have been established to have committed these crimes, they number more than 8,000," Alexander Khazin, head of an investigation unit of the Economic Security Department of the Interior Ministry, told the Rossiya-24 channel.
In 2009, corruption proceedings were launched against 15,000 people, Khazin said. "Just think about it – 15,000 officials. It is practically equivalent to the entire personnel of a serious federal agency or all officials of a large constituent territory of the Russian Federation," he said.
When the Economic Security Department quotes its statistics at international conferences, some of the delegates "are speechless because our numbers of corrupt officials who have come under prosecution are equivalent to their [country’s] populations," Khazin said.
He said that, for the first six months of 2010, his investigation unit had launched criminal action against four people who were incumbents or former regional governors at that time, three regional ministers, eight members of various tiers of the legislative branch, 12 heads and deputy heads of municipalities, and 15 chiefs of federal executive bodies of various levels.
