Putin proposes criminal liability for corrupt bosses

Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who scored a landslide victory in Sunday’s presidential elections, pledged to introduce criminal liability for state firm bosses involved in corruption. “We should follow world best practices. For example, the practice that envisages criminal liability already for failure to provide information or the provision of false data,” Putin said at a meeting with Vice-Premier Igor Sechin that discussed the activity of executives at state companies. Putin instructed the government to prepare corresponding proposals to submit them to the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s parliament. Putin recently criticized major state-run companies operating in strategic sectors of the Russian economy for the practice of channeling profits into offshore accounts. Following Putin’s instructions, Russia’s Audit Chamber has launched spring inspections at the biggest state companies, Gazprom, Transneft, Russian Railways, Sovcomflot, VTB, Vnesheconombank, Rosatom, Sberbank and others, to expose corruption schemes and the personnel connected with offshore accounts. Putin said the introduction of criminal liability would “create a situation discouraging the [executives'] desire to engage in illegal activities.” Sechin said the government’s inspections had already exposed over 200 cases of the concealment of information by state firm executives about their participation in commercial structures.