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MOSCOW - A leaked speech given by Russia's most senior policeman has revealed that almost one tenth of the world's largest country is under the control of organised crime groups who often face little or no official resistance.
According to Rashid Nurgaliyev, head of Russia's Interior Ministry, the Russian mafia is well established in Moscow, St Petersburg, the south of the country and Siberia.
"This problem poses a threat to the state, society and the economy," he warned, adding that more than 3.8 million crimes were registered last year, up by 8.5 per cent on 2005.
He admitted that clear-up rates were less than satisfactory and said criminals were caught in only 46 per cent of cases.
He listed dozens of Moscow districts and other cities where organised crime groups posed what he called "a serious threat to the safety of the region". In many cases law enforcement authorities were doing far too little to break the mafia's stranglehold on significant swathes of the economy, he said, adding that key sectors were already in criminal hands.
According to the daily newspaper Novye Izvestia, Nurgaliyev's bleak assessment of the situation effectively means that one tenth of Russia's regions are in criminal hands; in most cases the regions are among the country's wealthiest and most promising.
Experts in organised crime said separately that up to 25 per cent of Russia's gross domestic product is generated by the "black" economy, much of which is under the control of organised crime groups. It is a figure which dwarfs the size of the shadow economies in western European countries which typically account for between 5 and 10 per cent of countries' gross domestic products.
Organised crime expert Aleksei Mukhin added that Russia is now home to up to 10,000 criminal groupings employing 300,000 people, most of whom are paid to protect the businesses and assets of a small number of powerful mafia leaders.
Since the 1990s many of those leaders have "legitimised" their businesses, acquiring a veneer of respectability that has seen them open superficially "normal" companies.
At the same time crime rates have fallen as mafia groups have moved to maintain order on their own patches.
Nurgaliyev's revelations coincide with one of President Vladimir Putin's biggest anti-corruption drives of recent years.
Across the country, local politicians and regional governors have found themselves charged with embezzlement and abuse of power.
Perhaps the most high-profile victim of this purge has been Vladimir Nikolayev, the Mayor of the far eastern city of Vladivostok and a member of Putin's United Russia party.
This month the Mayor, who already had a criminal record and had an underworld nickname of "Winnie the Pooh", was arrested and accused of funding his bodyguards from city coffers, of using police cars for private escort duty and of using expensive charter planes for family holidays at taxpayers' expense.
The Mayor owns some of the region's biggest seafood, meat processing and timber firms and came to power in 2004 after his closest rival for the Mayor's job "tripped" on a powerful grenade that had been placed outside his office days before the election.
Typically businessmen with backgrounds as colourful as Nikolayev's tend to prefer lower-profile roles, placing trusted lieutenants in key political positions in order to attract less attention.
In 1999 a court sentenced Nikolayev to 3 years in prison for beating a local official and threatening to kill another.
He served 1 years before being released as part of a general amnesty.
- INDEPENDENT
