MOSCOW, February 5 (RIA Novosti) - Russia's president has formed an interdepartmental group to draft amendments to the law on corruption as part of a national anti-corruption campaign, the Kremlin press service said Monday.
The group led by presidential aide Viktor Ivanov must be completed by February 15 and must submit its proposals on how to bring Russian laws in line with the UN Convention against Corruption and the Council of Europe Criminal Law Convention on Corruption by August 1.
The anti-corruption campaign in the country has resulted in about 600 bribery and embezzlement cases, which have been opened since July after President Vladimir Putin, who has set the fight against corruption as a national priority, ordered the new prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, to draw up an anti-corruption strategy.
First Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman said in November that annual corruption in Russia had reached $240 billion, a sum almost equal to the federal budget.
One of the most publicized bribery scandals was the arrest of former senator Levon Chakhmakhchyan, who prosecutors accuse of forming an organized group to extort funds from companies.
Governors of Russian provinces have also come under prosecution. A former mayor of Tomsk in Siberia, Alexander Makarov, is one of the latest targets in a series of corruption probes. He suffered a heart attack at a meeting with law-enforcement officials, and is suspected, together with a relative, of extorting $114,000 from local residents by threatening to destroy their real estate and prevent them from rebuilding.
The probe follows an investigation into another Siberian regional leader in Khakassia in July, and the arrests of the mayor of Volgograd in southern Russia in June, and the governor and deputy governor of the northwest Siberian Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Area on embezzlement charges in May.
