Hi everyone. Here’s what’s happening with the investigation into the bribes our officials received from Daimler. A quick reminder of the timeline (kindly put together by vlatrif): Starting around March 20, reports began emerging about the U.S. investigation in which Daimler admitted it had paid bribes to Russian officials. Official representatives of the Interior Ministry and the Prosecutor General’s Office said this was “not grounds for an inquiry.” Dozens of articles on the subject in the Russian media are being ignored. On April 5, we started bombarding everyone with complaints and crime reports. On April 6, there was a wave of comments on Medvedev’s blog. Medvedev gave a direct order to conduct an inquiry. On April 28, the Prosecutor General’s Office announced that it had requested the case materials from the United States. Detailed timeline here. It’s hard to say whether our mass appeals were the main reason for Medvedev’s reaction. I think they were. Some think they were one factor, but not the main one. In the grand scheme of things, I don’t really care—as long as the investigation moves forward. But that part is not going smoothly. I met with representatives of the U.S. Department of Justice. They confirmed that they had met with Russia’s Prosecutor General’s Office, but for obvious reasons refused to comment on the details or on whether any documents had been handed over. This is regulated intergovernmental cooperation, and they can’t disclose anything about it to a private individual (or even to a representative of some group). The most important thing they explained was this: under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, anyone can pull case materials from the court archives. In other words, anyone can get everything the Prosecutor General’s Office wanted to obtain. We’re digging through those archives now, and we’ll pull out everything we need, even though it’s a complete maze in there. Overall, I came away with a clear sense that the Americans are highly skeptical about the zeal of the Russian prosecutor’s office. And we now have every reason to share that skepticism, because we have a fact: President Medvedev’s instructions, uh... how to put this mildly... do not carry much authority with law enforcement agencies. They are openly burying the case. The Prosecutor General’s Office passed everything on to the Moscow prosecutor’s office:
The Moscow prosecutor’s office passed the case on to Moscow’s UBEP (Department for Combating Economic Crimes):
(This is just the image Google returns for the query “UBEP Moscow Main Internal Affairs Directorate”) Question: should a large-scale, high-profile investigation into bribes allegedly taken by people in the Interior Ministry the Federal Protective Service the Defense Ministry the Moscow city government Ufa Novy Urengoy really be handled by Moscow’s UBEP? The answer is obvious. And take a moment to appreciate the elegance of the trick: the Prosecutor General’s Office writes about corruption in general, but the Moscow prosecutor’s office is already writing only about the episode involving the Moscow city government. And what about the rest? There have been no letters from the Military Prosecutor’s Office, or the prosecutor’s offices in Ufa or Novy Urengoy. Moscow’s UBEP is also handling the VTB drilling rigs case that you all know about, so we know perfectly well what kind of investigators they are. Obviously, if this inquiry were actually aimed at identifying the guilty parties and holding them accountable, the case should have remained with the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Interior Ministry’s Investigative Committee. It’s hard to imagine a Moscow UBEP operative showing up to inspect the Federal Protective Service. He’d get a solid kick before he even made it through the door. Most interesting of all: one of the complainants has already been summoned to this very UBEP to give a statement. With his permission, I’m publishing excerpts from his description of the spectacular meeting with the police officer: *The case is being handled by operative Dmitry Sergeyevich Pshonov (Moscow UBEP, 44 Lyusinovskaya St., bldg. 2). A brief summary of our conversation and a few conclusions: So this whole high-profile case has been dumped down to the level of Moscow’s UBEP—good thing it wasn’t dumped all the way down to the Tverskoye local police precinct; Much more than the case against the officials itself, he (the operative) was interested in why corruption in Russia interested me so much, why there were so many absolutely identical statements from different citizens in different parts of Russia, how much I had been paid! to submit this statement (he probably thought it was all the work of foreign intelligence services trying to rock the boat), and where I had gotten the statement from (I don’t know whether I did the right thing or not, but I didn’t tell him about you and your blog). He told me there is corruption in England and in the U.S. too. He asked whether I might be one of those people who want the president to live like everyone else! Or maybe one of those who stand at pickets with placards! In short, in the first part of the conversation he was talking complete crap; He said that their department had been almost entirely cut back, talked about how pressure was being put on the cops (so far except for the economic crimes unit), and how there was a whole “campaign” in the press—he used all this to justify his rude behavior, while I, you see, was sending in vague nonsense and distracting him from other work; He said he had no authority to send requests to the Special Purpose Garage (the state motor pool serving top officials) or any of the other agencies mentioned in public sources, including the FBI and the U.S. Department of Justice. If he did decide to do that, someone would most likely come to him and ask the rhetorical question: “Dmitry, are you an idiot?” and he’d be forced into retirement immediately if he requested anything extra. The most he plans to do is send requests to the Russian companies Dorinvest and Mashinoimport. He predicts the response will be: we don’t know anything about this. *So there you have it. Just so you know how the “direct instructions of the President of the Russian Federation” are carried out. But oh well. As if anyone was expecting anything different. Under these circumstances, the importance of our actions increases sharply. It’s obvious that if anyone is going to force these crooked cops to conduct a real investigation, it will be us. Right now there are 123 people in the Google group that is registering volunteers willing to work on the case. We’ve split into teams by area, we’re doing monitoring, analysis, drafting paper requests, and so on. I wouldn’t say our work is going especially briskly yet—this is our first experience of this kind. So far I’d give us a C, but *in *any case, I don’t see any point in expanding the group further. As for everyone who wants to help, here’s what I urge you to do: What we need now is maximum public oversight of the case. At every level. Maximum involvement from opinion leaders, and so on. Many of you know deputies of various levels, members of Public Chambers, and the like. In other words, people who have the ability to send official inquiries. It doesn’t have to be a State Duma deputy—let it be a deputy from the Ryazan regional legislature, or a member of the Khoroshyovo-Mnyovniki municipal council. Independent politicians, Communists, A Just Russia members, and LDPR members could all take part here first and foremost. Maybe someone can even persuade a United Russia member, although it’s obvious they’re a bunch of crooks who would love to see the case closed. The point is that when they try to shut the case down, they’ll be rubbing not only the President of Russia’s face in it, but also the faces of a broad circle of interested parties. Many of them are less tolerant of that sort of thing than the President is. It’s well known that deputies and members of Public Chambers are lazy people, so I’ve prepared a template request that they can supplement if necessary and send to the Prosecutor General’s Office or to the President. The request is formatted as a State Duma deputy’s template, so if you have access to some other kind of deputy, only minimal editing is needed. Those who can help with this, please say so in the comments. Our registration group will get in touch with you to obtain a copy of the request and log it in our database. Thanks in advance. Please spread the information. Let the crooks not think that people “made some noise on the internet and forgot about it.” We’ll keep making noise to the very end. Update An absolutely outrageous reply received by someone in Ufa: