Prosecutors earlier launched a criminal case against several officials from the Vladivostok city administration, including Mayor Vladimir Nikolayev, who have been allegedly involved in the illegal sale of land.
"At present, the investigation established 11 cases where plots of land were sold for 38 million rubles ($1.45 million) less than the market price," the official said.
But Nikolayev said in a statement that the investigation was launched by his opponents to discredit the city authorities' policies and destabilize the situation in Vladivostok.
"They [the investigators] were ordered to find any flaw and immediately launch criminal cases [against the administration]," Nikolayev said in an appeal to Vladivostok residents. "They have found such a pretext this time."
Police searched Monday the offices of the city administration and seized a number of files and documents.
Russia's Interior Minister Rashid Nurgaliyev highlighted on February 9 his ministry's success in tackling economic and financial crimes in Russia, which has witnessed a series of high-profile corruption and money laundering cases in 2006.
"Considerable attention has been focused on protecting budget funds allocated to national [welfare] projects. This sphere will remain a priority in 2007," the minister said.
The anti-corruption campaign in the country has resulted in the instigation of about 600 bribery and embezzlement cases since July, when President Vladimir Putin set the fight against corruption as a national priority and ordered the new prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, to draw up an anti-corruption strategy.
First Deputy Prosecutor General Alexander Buksman said last November that corruption in Russia had reached an annual figure of $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 accused 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 followed 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.
