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Russia lost $692 mln because of corruption in 2018, says top prosecutor

Damage from corruption uncovered during criminal investigations for nine months of this year totaled $692 million

© Kirill Kukhmar/TASS

MOSCOW, December 12. /TASS/. Damage from corruption uncovered during criminal investigations for nine months of this year totaled 46 billion rubles ($692 million), Russian Prosecutor General Yuri Chaika reported.

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The top prosecutor noted that the proportion that corruption itself occupies, "in the total number of crimes comes to just 1.7%, but the material damage, totaling 46 billion rubles, is already 11% of the damage incurred by all types of crimes across the Russian Federation," the prosecutor general said in an interview with newspaper Kommersant.

That said, damage to the tune of 30 billion rubles ($451 million) was recovered. He said that "corrupt officials voluntarily compensated about 8.5 billion rubles ($128 million), and property worth more than 1.1 billion rubles ($16 million) was sequestered from them, in addition assets to the tune of nearly 21 billion ($315 million) were confiscated," Chaika reported.

In nine months of this year, 7,800 convictions were handed down to 8,500 defendants over corruption-related criminal cases, among them 837 law enforcement officers, 63 regional and municipal parliamentary members, 606 federal and local officials (the majority are heads of municipal entities and local administrations).

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