Everyone is writing about how one of the senior officials in the Interior Ministry’s anti-corruption department was dismissed. He was found to own an undeclared apartment in Montenegro.
This news leaves me more puzzled than anything else. He was fired, and ...?
The guy was a high-ranking Interior Ministry officer. He headed Division “F” — finance. That is one of the areas with the highest corruption risks, where enormous sums of money are in play, and if he was falsifying his asset declarations, then he was very likely cheating in everything else too.
That means the job of the Interior Ministry and the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service) is to find out where he got the money to buy property in Montenegro. They should check the accounts used to purchase the apartment and pay the utility bills.
But no one will do that — in Russia, officials are not prohibited from having assets worth more than their lawful income. You get punished only if you fail to declare them; no one asks what sources of money you used to buy them. In the terminology of Russia’s “ombudsman,” asking such questions is “a new ’37” (a reference to the Great Terror of 1937 under Stalin).
And here I want to remind you once again about our bill to combat illicit enrichment.
In the beautiful Russia of the future, a police colonel like this will not simply be fired — he will be asked, “Where did the money come from?” And if he cannot provide a documented answer, then a fair court will sentence him to five years in prison, without anyone having to prove any specific bribes.
All fully in line with the humane provisions of the UN Convention against Corruption. Otherwise, nothing will work.
That is exactly why it does not work under the current authorities, who do not want to dig into Colonel Katkov’s money, because none of these officials would want anyone digging into their own money someday. They much prefer the option where “in the worst case, you just get fired and go on living comfortably.”
That does not work for us: