US$131 million in cash seized from home of Russian anti-corruption police colonel

This probably wasn’t the kind of publicity for Russia’s campaign against corruption that the Kremlin might have wished for.

Russia’s Investigative Committee posted a picture of stacks of bills inside a safe after it seized cash worth 8.5 billion rubles (US$131 million) from a Moscow apartment. It said the money came from an apartment of Dmitry Zakharchenko, a police colonel who heads an anti-corruption unit within the Interior Ministry, providing an eye-opening example for Russians of the scale of alleged graft within the government system.

In US$100 bills, the cash would weigh about 1.3 tonnes.

The Rosbalt news service reported that another 300 million euros (US$337 million) was found in Swiss bank accounts belonging to Zakharchenko’s father, citing a person in law enforcement that it didn’t identify. Zakharchenko is charged with abuse of office and the probe involves only the seized 8.5 billion rubles “at the moment,” the Investigative Committee said in a statement Wednesday. His lawyer, Yuri Novikov, said he knows nothing about any Swiss accounts, according to the RIA Novosti news service.

President Vladimir Putin in April endorsed a national anti-corruption plan for 2016-2017 that requires government bodies to “achieve tangible results in preventing” graft. Russian officials have announced several high-profile cases, signaling a renewed determination to crack down on crooked officials as the economy struggles through a second year of recession, its longest in two decades. The scale of the allegations against Zakharchenko and the fact that his job was to root out corruption have given his arrest greater resonance than other investigations this year that have targeted the former head of the customs service, several regional governors and prominent businessmen.