MOSCOW, September 6 (RIA Novosti) – A number of high-ranking Russian officials have provided false information in their income declarations, the head of the presidential administration said Friday.
“I would like to avoid naming names, but we have some concrete results concerning exposed facts of officials providing false information,” Sergei Ivanov said on the sidelines of the G20 summit in St. Petersburg.
He said the officials were “pretty high-ranking” and included staff of security services, but he declined to elaborate.
“We’ll make everything public when the time comes,” Ivanov said, adding that checks were ongoing into the declarations of alleged offenders.
Senior Russian officials, as well as their spouses and underage children, are obliged to disclose their income, a measure meant to curb rampant corruption in the country’s bureaucracy. However, officials are not required to specify where the money came from.
Russia in 2003 signed a UN anti-corruption treaty, but refused to ratify an article that would have introduced accountability for officials whose actual income far exceeds their official salaries without any credible explanation.
About 1.3 million Russian officials filed income declarations last year. A commission headed by Ivanov has checked 211,000 of them and fired 322 officials over inconsistencies, the Kremlin reported in April.
Russia ranked 133rd of 174 countries in the latest Corruption Perceptions Index by the Transparency International watchdog in 2012.
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