The Russian Prosecutor General's Office has sent a case of price fixing on medical equipment bought under government contracts to its special investigations committee, spokeswoman Irina Gridneva said on Friday.
She said it would be up to investigators now to decide on whether to press criminal charges against the individuals involved in the price gouging.
On Tuesday, presidential aide Konstantin Chuichenko reported on a gross overpricing of medical equipment in the Rostov region, where several x-ray machines were bought on a government contract for 90.3 million rubles ($3 million) each - almost three times the manufacturer's price of 34.5 million rubles ($1.1 million).
President Dmitry Medvedev ordered Prosecutor General Yury Chaika to look into the case and punish those guilty.
Gridneva said the Prosecutor General's Office had established that the Health and Social Development Ministry had violated the budget law in distributing federal budgetary funding among federal "medical and state educational establishments."
She said the ministry had allocated excessive funding for the purchase of overpriced medical equipment, specifically x-ray tomographs, thus causing the federal budget damages of at least 376 million rubles ($12.5 million).
Chuichenko said the price soared because the x-ray machines were bought via two intermediaries, one in Britain and the other in Russia.
Medvedev ordered amendments to government procurements law that will see that medical equipment is bought with regard to manufacturers' prices. The government will also introduce unified requirements for the equipment and price monitoring.
But the overpricing, however gross, was quite legal, a government official said, since the maximum price of a government contract is not stipulated by law and is set by the customer with regard to the budget limit.
The procurement law originally contained mistakes and amendments would be of little help, Alexander Stroganov from the government contract center said. Unless there is a centralized control over purchases, overpricing and corruption will continue to thrive.
A Russian Federal Anti-Monopoly Service official said, however, that medical equipment should be sold in an auction.
MOSCOW, August 13 (RIA Novosti)
