Russian officials, the easiest to corrupt in Europe

Russian civil servants are the most corrupt in Europe, as long as the value of most of the bribes demanded is between 100 and 500 euros, Kommersant daily showed yesterday, citing government data.

The cited source states: The demand for services among corrupt officials is increasing, according to recent judicial statistics: last year, the number of people convicted of bribery in the form of services ranked second among other categories ranked by the size of the bribe. The most popular bribe amount in Russia remains between 10,000 (100 euros) and 50,000 rubles (500 euros), according to judicial statistics on corruption cases published by the Judicial Department of the Supreme Court. For such extortion, 5,245 people were convicted in 2023, that is, about a quarter of all those sent before the courts for corruption offenses (in total there were 22,014 such people last year).

"Services of a non-proprietary nature" were in second place - 3,760 corrupt officials took advantage of them. In third place is bribery in the amount of 1,000 (10 euros) to 10,000 rubles (100 euros), and only in fourth and fifth place are amounts from 150,000 rubles (1,500 euros) - 2,978 cases of corruption and of 1 million rubles (10,000 euros) - 1800 convicts. The lowest number of cases was registered with respect to the bribe amount of 500 rubles (5 euros), but still almost 700 people were prosecuted for it, the quoted source said.

Traditionally, the most frequent crime of corruption remains receiving (2,134 people) and less often, giving bribes (1,526 convicted).

It is worth noting that in 2022, the crimes of giving and taking bribes in terms of prevalence (3,404 convicted) were only in third place - by the value of the amounts that were in the range of 10,000-50,000 rubles (4,137 people) and 1,000-10,000 thousand rubles (3658 people). For comparison, in 2012, when the Russian judiciary just started publishing separate statistics on corruption cases, only two such cases (out of 5,428 crimes) were registered. The most popular value of the bribe at that time was in the range of 1000 -10,000 rubles: such amounts appeared in 2,231 verdicts in 2023, which is almost half of the total number in 2012.

According to judicial statistics, as part of measures to control the income and expenses of civil servants, last year the courts considered 358 requests for the conversion of properties worth 3.4 billion rubles into state income and approved 325 of them, in value of 239 million rubles.