Financial Transparency Coalition

Since the 1999 Duma election, which was widely considered free and fair, Russia has descended from a “Partly Free” society, according to Freedom House’s Freedom in the World Rankings, to “Not Free” this year. In the last six years, Russia has passed a law giving bureaucrats discretion to shut down NGOs; an assassin murdered Anna Politkovskaya, an investigative journalist who was critical of the Kremlin, in cold blood; and the government heavily manipulated the parliamentary elections to give a majority to pro-government parties. Corruption has been an endemic part of Russia’s public and private sectors for decades. Global Financial Integrity...

Foreign bribery in Russiais a huge problem for the country’s economy. Investors are threatening to flee in droves in the face of ever increasing official depravity and the tightening of domestic laws on bribery abroad. Transparency International estimates that the total annual amount paid in bribes inRussia is worth $300 billion—equivalent to the GDP of Denmark. Global Financial Integrity estimates that the country lost an average $47 billion in illicit financial flows per year, a number which money transferred abroad stemming from tax evasion, corruption, and trade mispricing. Corruption has become an endemic characteristic of Russia’s public sector....

Since his election Russian President Dmitry Medvedev has been talking about corruption. The subject has had prominence in many of his speeches since his campaign in 2008. In September of 2009 he announced a major reform program aiming to tackle rampant corruption in his country, although he didn’t actually detail what the reform program would include. Medvedev has also repeatedly vowed to tackle corruption in the court systems, stating that Russia should do its best to “make the courts become as much as possible independent from the authorities and at the same time to absolutely depend on...